Getting Links From the BBC … Well, Kinda!

After taken a week and a bit break from blogging, social networking etc.. I thought it was time to jump back on the bandwagon and get things moving again. Before I started getting into the grind, I had a wee peak at Google Webmaster Tools where I noticed a number of links coming from a site called Shownar.

After a little bit of investigating it turns out that Shownar is the BBC’s experimental prototype to track buzz online about its shows.

At the moment, Shownar, is centered around the BBC’s iPlayer, but it is expected that, if it becomes popular enough, it will be the main site for taking the online pulse of shows from other TV networks including American.

Why was NSM featured, well it was this post : Top Sources For Online Related News where I mentioned the BBC’s technology program Click!

How does Shownar Work?
Basically by tracking inbound links to various programme-related pages on the bbc.co.uk. Shownar monitors Yahoo! Search BOSS, Nielson Online’s BlogPulse (which indexes over 100 million blogs), and Twingly (which searches microblogging services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca for links, even when they are shortened using URL shortening services such as TinyURL and bit.ly).