Bravo to the Times

I might be late on this, but I just discovered a new button on the bottom of some nytimes.com stories. It says Sphere It! next to a little blue logo. When you click, up pops a window with links to blog posts and articles related to the story you just read.
Holy mackerel, Charlie. There's been tons of debate about whether news sites should link to outside content, with many resisting. The point of this new-fangled Interweb, said the publishers, is to bring money into your news site, and only your news site. And here's The New York Times, with a story on Wikipedia, linking to similar stories on Yahoo!News, washingtonpost.com and ... FOXNews.com, not to mention on outside blogs, often seen as some sort of vicious enemy to the mainstream media.
Sphere, if you're unaware (as was I), is a blog search engine that claims to be different from - and better than - Technorati or Google's blog searcher. Sphere says its search tool weeds out spam and other junk blogs, leaving you with actually relevant results, not to mention listed related books, etc., and recommending blogs.
Sounds pretty good. This is an unscientific test, of course, but when I searched my last name I found only two results in the past six months, both of them spam. Maybe if more people were blogging about Slajda, this wouldn't be a problem. Hop to it, folks! Technorati, on the other hand, tends to bring up tons o' spam, lots of Xanga posts about my uncle the high-school English teacher, and links to the Northeastern News, which I write a column for.
Anyway. Bravo, I suppose, to the New York Times for letting go of their fears and linking to stories written by those not on the company payroll. It should be mentioned that Sphere It! only seems to appear at the bottom of stories in the technology section - perhaps us tech nerds and new media geeks are the ones to test this whole thing out on. And then we run off and blog about it, and those appear in Sphere, and ... ah, the new media cycle of life and gossip.
On a basically unrelated note, I'd also like to mention that the Times has a fun research gadget in all its stories. If you double click any word, a pop-up appears with background information from answers.com. Click on Louisville, Ky., and get a dictionary definition, an encyclopedia entry, the local weather and some other tidbits. Click on the word "growing," part of the phrase "growing pains," and you get a definition, the historic background of the idiom, and a medical definition. Sometimes it gets a little crazy, highlighting whole sentences or separating names ("Jimmy Wales" brought me information on either crowbars or the country, depending on which name I clicked), but like I said, fun.
Again, bravo to the times.