NAVEL GAZING….Are blogs influencing the outside world? Absolutely. The Guardian reports today that its most popular story of the past week was loaded ten times as much as its #2 story. Blogs accounted for the difference:
The page loaded 456,671 times was a story, originally published by the Observer, about a secret Pentagon report which warned the Bush administration that global warming could destroy the American way of life as they knew it.
….Every liberal with a weblog linked to the story, and when a story is trawled by the blogs traffic goes up; exponentially. Jane Perrone, Guardian Unlimited’s weblog editor explains. “The key to a story’s popularity amongst bloggers is if it’s picked up by one of the dozen or so big hitters. These celebrity bloggers include Glenn Reynolds, Joshua Micah Marshall and Doc Searls. A lot of bloggers will take their lead from these names, or from aggregators like Popdex and Blogdex.”
But what about me? I linked to that story, not those other guys.
Sigh. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Perhaps James Joyner inadvertantly provides the explanation by pointing to a study that claims that lots of bloggers get their ideas from other blogs without attributing them. Bastards. I immediately went to the Blog Epidemic Analyzer and typed in my URL, and sure enough, people are stealing my ideas! Between May 1-21 of 2003, Calpundit was referenced 96 times explicitly and 67 times implicitly ? i.e., without attribution. Clearly, something must be done.
Suitable punishments should be submitted in comments.
