How do websites get links here...

[cgman]

Does anyone know how people get into the "Top Links on This Topic" section of the Huffington Post?

I can see that the "Around the Web" section is curated by someone, in this case "Jeff Muskus" but there is no indication how the Top Links on This Topic appear on a page.

The only thing I noticed is that the original article appearing in HP is almost a year older than any of the referenced links.

Image:

http://epicscripts.com/HuffPo.jpg

Original link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/23/abuse-victim-lawsuit-trea_n_549542.html

[cgman]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/24/mitt-romney-airplane-windows_n_1910930.html

It seems hit and miss on each article. Most flagged as "social reading" have some part of the widget, while others don't. Hmmmmm!

Did a little searching around:

http://mashable.com/2010/04/14/twitter-anywhere-launch/

I think this module comes from Twitter anywhere api.

[matbennett]

Can you share a link to the one with the klout scores.

Is there a date filter as well? Are you seeing examples where the links in the twitter box point to content newer than than the story, or does it all predate it?

[cgman]

I noticed on a different article the same widget was displaying Klout scores for various twitter users. I have a sneaking suspicion that the links come from high Klout score individuals who tweet about the issue. I'm going to test this out!

[matbennett]

The fact that they are wrapped within the Twitter branding strongly suggests that they are coming from Twitter rather than being under editorial control from huffpost.

The naming of those elements in the HTML would seem to back that up as well: id="twt-top-links-page-1" and id="twitter_top_links"

It's not a widget style I have seen anywhere else, so presumably it uses the twitter API to do searches.  What logic they use to rank those is anyones guess. Could be as simple as pulling the most tweeted URLs from posts matching the shown search string... could be something far more complicated.

Very interesting though... might be worth some experimentation comparing API results with the results on some of the more obscure articles.

[benjaminspak]

Personally I would email/call the editor about it. Network with them on Twitter and Linked In as well.