In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.
That is a bet recorded at the LongBets foundation. 2,000 bucks are at stake. But two things have happened recently that may impact the outcome of this bet:
- The New York Times has just opened his archives, and all the old stories are now free to read. That will prompt the bloggers to link to some interesting NYT oldies (as Jason Kottke has done already), which in turn will help these NYT stories to rank higher in Google Search results. That will also prompt the bloggers to link more to current stories from the New York Times, knowing that the dollar wall has disappeared.
- The New York Times has just opened plenty of blogs (powered by market leader WordPress.org) under his umbrella site (NYtimes.com). The Freakonomics blog and the Paul Krugman blog are two examples of “weblogs”, as defined in the LongBets contract statement, that are hosted as sub-websites of the New York Times.
The two points above illustrate, as you’ve understood, the upcoming “convergence” or “fusion” between the so-called “mainstream media” and the new “citizen media”. Now, will this new trend in web publishing help the New York Times backers to win the LongBets bet? Jason Kottke, last year, investigated and said that the blogs are going to win. We will see.
Psstt… I don’t like that the bet lays on 5 news stories, only. The sample should have been made longer than that.
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ADDENDUM: Type “eLab eXchange” in Google Search, and our group blog on prediction markets (Midas Oracle) ranks higher than the New York Times story entirely devoted to publicize the eLab eXchange. Upon discovering that, Donna Hoffman’s face turned yellow, as you’ll see below. 
HERE IS THE GOOGLE SEARCH SCREEN SHOT:
AND HERE’S DONNA HOFFMAN’S YELLOW MUGSHOT:
Donna Hoffman of the eLab eXchange and marketing professor at the University of California at Riverside
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Here’s another example where our group blog (Midas Oracle) ranks higher than the New York Times (more exactly, higher than the Freakonomics blog webhosted by the New York Times site):
