One of the New York Times's keenest online features is the sidebar window that allows you to toggle between the most frequently e-mailed and most frequently blogged articles. Select a cherished preconceived notion about navel-gazing Internerds/the great unwashed masses and find up to 20 bullet points to confirm your suspicions!
Check out the peculiar data from the arts section:
versus
And the last time I checked, there were only two or three top-blogged stories. As it happens, I just ran down my visual art RSS feeds, and of about 40 bloggers, only one had posted a link today to an article in the Times. Which only confirms my dearly held suspicions about the MSM. Arts bloggers are too busy writing original content to bridge the gaps in the dailies' coverage to write much about what the dailies think. For example, Lee Rosenbaum has written a lot on last night's recordbreaking Sotheby's contemporary art auction without mentioning this article once.
Posted by Kriston at May 16, 2007 4:40 PMThey need a third list, "Most Frequently Del.icio.us'ed/Digg'ed/Otherwise-Socially-Networked."
Posted by: son1 at May 16, 2007 5:58 PMI'd noticed similar things. It's even worse with less trafficked (though still quite prominent) websites. Boston.com will sometimes have the same results in its "Hot Searches" and "Most Emailed" (no blog links) for days. In some cases the stories in the latter category make sense--they are popular items for readily apparent reasons. But all too often that's not the case, which makes me wonder how many people are using these features.
Posted by: JL at May 16, 2007 8:15 PM