Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism unveiled a new index yesterday that traces blogs and social networking sites. To be honest, it doesn’t say a whole lot that we don’t already know.
The New Media Index’s first report states “From the preparations to the swearing-in to the music, President Barack Obama’s inauguration was by far and away the dominant subject debated and dissected by bloggers, user news sites and other social media last week.” The index reported that close to 63 percent of links embedded in social media sites related to the inauguration. Big surprise. The report also said that commentary was very passionate and ran the “ideological gamut.” Also, not earth-shattering news and confirms what everyone already knows-people tend to be more politically feisty on blogs and social media sites.
What is interesting is that main stream media dropped its focus on the inauguration after Tuesday and concentrated on news surrounding President Obama’s policy agenda and cabinet appointees. Does this suggest that inauguration coverage provided by blogs was generally more insightful and attentive than the main stream media’s coverage? Or simply that blogs tend to chew their stories longer than the traditional press? Pew’s index doesn’t really give any indication one way or the other.
PEJ has been searching tirelessly to find a way to monitor the blogosphere, like it does for main stream media. Their solution uses Technorati and IceRocket to track and index more than 100 million blogs and social media sites. PEJ then captures the top daily linked-to stories and analyzes their content. The Project also tracks the most popular news videos on YouTube each week. In another astonishing twist, C-SPAN’s broadcast of the inauguration topped the list.
Judging from the content of this week’s index and other indexes Pew has released, I would not expect a whole lot of surprises from the New Media Index.
Maybe they can release a report for top 10 things blogosphere covered like google has top 10 searches.
Where can i fin google top 10?
It’s great to see people with no horse in the race, so to speak, researching these issues. But the way they are written sometimes, I wonder if the people doing the research are more than vaguely familar with the topics they’re studying.
While this research is not extremely useful, it is nice to see that there are companies who are trying to make a difference. So, on that note, I applaud them.
However, I’d like to see some much more interesting demographics. Maybe the percentage of people trying to earn money from blogging vs the percent of people doing it for fun?
The traditional media moved on from the inauguration the day after because it was by then old news. They are in the news business.
agreed
freefreebiefinder.com
nice 7, – Pradeep
We have making such routine reports for our exec’s on a weekly basis We haven’t 150mln blogs in assets actually There are only 17mln accounts in LiveJournal (for now) globally (I’m working in http://www.crun...com/company/sup) But I think it is a good sample too And it’s is nothing more then fun and to be discussed something on corporate parties I think It’s hard to do something with such a data
yes we do monitoring public opinion and yes we know what is popular And if we will do a professional content we know how to bring attention to it but know it is merely useful
google is top 10
The traditional media moved on from the inauguration the day after because it was by then old news. They are in the news business.