Development Seed Blog

From a Blog to Traditional Media, Then Back to Blogs

Who would have thunk that Fidel Castro could be a buzz leader in the U.S. blogosphere? Well, not me at least. But he sure was when he published his thoughts on the invincibility of a Clinton Obama ticket in 2008 - it positively rocketed around the blogosphere.

I took a quick look at a Blogpulse trend report on the phrase "Clinton Obama ticket" and got the graph below. Check out the large spike in the term's use right around today. Wow, right?

You can’t really tell on this image, but the traffic on that term was almost nil on August 27th and then spiked on the 28th. The spike is even larger if you look at the posting traffic for the last 6 months.

Obviously, Castro was hardly the first person to think, postulate, or write about the possibility of the two nominees joining forces, but why would his article in a Spanish-language paper lead to such a burst of discussion?

Well, CNN seems to have started the buzz yesterday around 6.30 pm by breaking the story. The rest is history. The take away is that, while we wholeheartedly endorse (and make a living by helping organizations adopt) a network-centric media strategy, don't discount the power of the traditional media to push a story around the blogosphere. It still does… at least for now.

Technorati, Blogpulse, and Google don’t have a lot of links showing yet, so this may be a relatively minor spike in conversation. But it’s fun to think about. 

Drop a comment if you know of any other news/blog/social network monitoring tools that you love or hate. As you may know, we are working on one ourselves. More on that later!