January 21, 2006

Trying to read blog charts.

What inferences can you make from blogging patterns? For example, look at this chart for blogging about Samuel Alito:
Technorati Chart


I see confirmation. If the nomination were running into trouble, the discussions would have kept up. Right?

Okay, that was an easy one. Let's look at films. Here's "Brokeback Mountain":
Technorati Chart


The recent spike is the Golden Globes. But I'm impressed by the overall building of the discussion.

Compare "Capote":
Technorati Chart


Again, there's that Golden Globes spike, but maybe there's a slight increase in the level over time.

Let's try to read how the domestic surveillance issue is affecting politics. It's harder to think of what search term to use, but I'm going with "NSA":
Technorati Chart


Well? What can you say? Bloggers react to news, but bloggers react to a certain type of news story. You know what the biggest story yesterday was, don't you? This. The 42-page Department of Justice legal analysis of the NSA program can't compare to a whale swimming in the Thames.
Posts that contain Whale per day for the last 30 days:
Technorati Chart


Actually, I'm surprised at how well the whale does on a non-Thames-swimming day.

So what do you think? Is there any future in reading blog charts?

3 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

Brokeback Mountain has been released to more and more theaters each week, so you're probably getting more entries like "Going to see Brokeback Mountain tonight with Susan . . . "

I thik the "controversy" part of the discussion is starting to fizzle out. I saw it last week. It's not controversial at all unless you have an agenda, i.e. you're FOX News and you want to increase ratings. This is a media generated controversy.

XWL said...

Admittedly the controversy regarding 'Brokeback Mountain' has been minimal, but what if Hollywood chooses to do a Brokeback-ified Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?