The
blogosphere was most interested in the Iraq war for the measurment
period of Sept. 6-10, with a quarter of the news links in blogs pointing
to those stories, according to the latest Pew New Media
Index.
It was the
number one news story, but didn't beat out a story about a White House
rug by much. The number two story on the blogs with 22% of links going
there was about a new rug for the Oval Office
and the paraphrase of an earlier quote that was attributed to Dr.
Martin Luther King.
Number three
in the blogosphere (12%) were links to a story about a school named
after former VP Al Gore but built on land that may be contaminated,
followed by links to two stories about the midterm
elections (11%) and at number 5 with 10%, the story of a minister who
threatened to burn Korans on Sept. 11.
According to
the survey, the top two Twitter topics were self referential. Number
one was the statement by New York Times Chairman Arthur Suzlberger Jr.
that the paper will likely someday drop the
print edition due to the growth of news on the Web--tweeters
(twitterers?) say it partly as a recognition of the importance of online
news. Number two was the story about a captive Japanese journalist in
Afghanistan who used a smart phone to tweet his location.
The index
uses data from millions of sites monitored by Web tracker Icerocket. It
used to collect blog and social media monitoring data from Technorati as
well, but according to Pew, "In recent months,
this component of Technorati's site has been down with no indication of
when it might resume."
