Washington Post: Instant Letters to the Editor

Earlier today I saw an article called “A Messy Age for Music” about digital music on the Washington Post site. It was part of a package the Post put together on the iPod’s 5th birthday.

I thought the article was pretty informative, but just took issue with a quote that essentially equated the iPod with Betamax or 8-Track tapes. Maybe it’s just that we’re an eight-iPod family that makes it personal for me, but I just believe that with this week’s announcement that Apple sold 8.73 million iPods in the last quarter, and bringing the cumulative total to more than 67.6 million, it’s pretty unlikely that Apple’s AAC format is going to become obsolete and unplayable.

I searched the web to find how many total 8-track units had been sold, and couldn’t find a figure. Anybody have a number on that? I’m betting it was significantly less than 67 million, and that the critical mass for the iPod format will keep it from becoming obsolete.

So I blogged about it, and linked back to not only that article, but all of the articles in the series.

Then, as I was reviewing traffic to my blog tonight, I realized something interesting: several readers had gotten to my post through the Washington Post site. When I clicked back I discovered this:

Post Links to Bloggers

Since this is powered by Technorati, I assume it’s important that you “ping” Techhnorati in order to be included in the listings. I have used the free service pingoat to ping Technorati and several other blog engines.

I had seen and heard some articles about how the Post “gets” the conversation of the blogosphere. It was neat to experience it first-hand, and to write a letter to the editor that was essentially published instantly.

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Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

0 thoughts on “Washington Post: Instant Letters to the Editor”

  1. Excuse me but your “pinging” assumption is incorrect. All wordpress.ocm blogs are servced by ping-o-matic. It’s not necessary for us to manually ping technorati. http://pingomatic.com/
    ” How do I send out update pings?
    Many services like Technorati, Feedster, Icerocket, Google Blog Search, and many others want a “ping” from you to know you’ve updated so they can index your content. In most blog software and blogging services you have to manually go to different websites to send let them know you’ve updated, and we’ve had a few questions from people who want to know if they have to do the same on WordPress.com.

    Nope! We handle it all for you. When you post we send a ping to Ping-O-Matic which then distributes it out to 15+ different services, all automatically. We want things to be as easy as possible for our users, so it’s another thing you just don’t have to worry about. 🙂 ” http://faq.wordpress.com/2005/09/28/update-pings/

  2. Thanks for the clarification. That saves a step for me, since I’m using WordPress.com.

    I had seen some other information about the need to ping, and Technorati suggests a way to make the pinging automatic for WordPress, but the instructions didn’t match with WordPress.com, so I thought I needed another service to do it. I’m glad it’s taken care of automatically with ping-o-matic.

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