Those of you who have blogs will have doubtless noticed those annoying commercial sites that specialize in linking to articles on a particular subject. So, for example, if I mention rugby in an article, or Britney Spears, within minutes some software bot will have picked that up and created a link to my article on a site that offers “all things rugby” or “all things Britney”. I’ve often wondered whether it was a workable business plan, and it seems that it is because the Boston Globe (owned by the New York Times Company) is rolling it out in earnest.

What the Globe is doing is creating a whole set of sub-pages that farm articles about particular parts of their catchment area and create a “local newspaper” from those links. As this Guardian article explains, this is getting up the nose of people who actually create those local news stories, because they see the Globe potentially siphoning off all of their advertising.

Now of course the Globe isn’t actually stealing content. If you want to read any of those news articles then you have to click through to the original provider. Therefore the Globe‘s site could be seen as driving traffic to these other sites. But what I think it is actually doing is risk avoidance.

As I see it, the Globe is resurrecting the old idea of the “portal site”, except whereas Yahoo tried (and failed) to become everyone’s gateway to the entire Internet, the Globe simply wants to be the gateway to all things Boston. If it then sends people off site to a variety of other local news sources, that’s OK provided that everyone who wants to know about Boston starts with the Globe. Because if they do, then the Globe will be the natural place for the bulk of the advertising.

It will be an interesting law suit. I very much hope that it gets heard by someone who knows a bit about how the Internet works.