It's not that remarkable...Google has provisions for breaking news style content, and as it sees traffic, searches, and ctr increasing for certain urls, it bumps it up in the SERPs...as things reach up the SERPs and especially when things make it into the trending topics, aggregators and autoblogs starting scraping the content and hosting it themselves.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 15.9 ms ] threadGoogle search: http://www.google.com/search?&q=carl+herold&btni=745
His website: www.highercomputingforeveryone.com
SEO 101