If the Times won't come to the mountain...

An essay I've struggled with writing for Jay Rosen about how the New York Times and other newspapers could become full citizens of the web has eluded me as I continue to mull over the possibilities, but in the meantime, it looks like some folks aren't waiting for the major media to open themselves up coherently and have instead, at least in the case of the Times, taken the blogosphere to the paper.

Quoting from What Blogosphere Says About NYT:

Wow: The Annotated New York Times tracks blog mentions of individual NYT articles.

If the reporters are reading all this stuff, will they have enough time for their actual jobs?

(Via Steve Rubel)

This is a great way to turn a newspaper inside-out. I imagine you could track other things this way too, such as governments and businesses (not as publishing media per se but as collections of topics discussed on the living web.)

I'm wonderin how they are aggregating the articles, though, as I saw a comment on an op-ed by Krugman but not a comment on that comment that also, as far as I could tell, linked to he original Times article, but perhaps it hadn't been picked up yet. Also, I wonderi f people using ther userland partnership method of linking to archived items will find their posts included in the same sweeps.