Bloggasm

By now, most of you likely know that the Dalai Lama Twitter account that popped up over a week ago was a fake, but that didn’t stop it from gathering nearly 20,000 followers before Twitter pulled the plug. For my PBS article this week I interviewed one of the co-founders of Twitter, Fake Steve Jobs, and a journalist who had originally reported on the account to determine how Twitter and other social media platforms should battle these celebrity impostors: How Celebrity Imposters Hurt Twitter’s Credibility

Slumdog Millionaire received 28,909 mentions in the blogosphere on Sunday, making it the most cited nominee from the Oscars. Angelina Jolie managed to receive 21,831 mentions on that day from blogs, making her the most-cited person.

Using metrics from Google Blog Search, I measured the number of mentions for all the nominees for a 24-hour period from midnight to midnight on Sunday.

For seven of the 10 major categories, the winner of the Academy Award was also the most-cited nominee in the blogosphere. The three exceptions were Best Actor (Mickey Rourke received 17,828 mentions), Best Actress (Angelina Jolie received 21,831 mentions), and Best Foreign Language Film (Waltz with Bashir received 3,949 mentions).

Below you’ll find the complete results. The winner in each category is followed by double asterisks and the nominee that received the most blog mentions in each category is bolded.

Best Picture

Slumdog Millionaire** — 28,909
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — 20,939
Frost/Nixon — 8,341
Milk — 20,676
The Reader — 16,123

Best Director

Danny Boyle** — 8,158
David Fincher — 3,791
Stephen Daldry — 2,381
Ron Howard — 3,183
Gus Van Sant — 3,591

Best Actor

Sean Penn** — 9,132
Mickey Rourke — 17,828
Richard Jenkins — 3,078
Frank Langella — 3,432
Brad Pitt — 16,741

Best Actress

Kate Winslet** — 16,106
Anne Hathaway — 11,428
Angelina Jolie — 21,831
Melissa Leo — 3,983
Meryl Streep — 7,287

Best Supporting Actor

Heath Ledger** — 17,336
Josh Brolin — 4,113
Robert Downey, Jr. — 6,242
Philip Seymour Hoffman — 3,290
Michael Shannon — 2,518

Best Supporting Actress

Penélope Cruz** — 19,725
Amy Adams — 6,779
Viola Davis — 4,579
Taraji P. Henson — 4,615
Marisa Tomei — 6,306

Best Original Screenplay

Milk** — 20,676
WALL-E — 15,518
Happy-Go-Lucky — 4,049
Frozen River — 6,929
In Bruges — 3,498

Best Adapted Screenplay

Slumdog Millionaire** — 28,909
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — 20,939
Doubt — 5,939
Frost/Nixon — 8,341
The Reader — 16,123

Best Animated Feature

WALL-E** — 15,518
Bolt — 4,867
Kung Fu Panda — 6,647

Best Foreign Language Film

Departures** — 2,905
Waltz with Bashir — 3,949
Revanche — 3,776
The Class — 2,666
The Baader Meinhof Complex — 1,176

From a long TNR profile of Politico

Politico employs three publicists who routinely send out links to bloggers and producers. “We’re pretty damn methodical about making sure anybody who cares about a story we wrote knows about it,” VandeHei says. Allbritton tells me that, for too long, journalists have been overly squeamish at the idea of promoting their own work. “I think a lot journalists say there’s something ethically and morally wrong about [p.r.],” he says. “I’m like, wait a minute, if you wrote a great story that’s factually accurate, why would you be ashamed of that?”

This is why between 50 to 80 bloggers a week get “news tips” from me promoting articles I’ve written for PBS or elsewhere, and a very high percentage of them end up posting links. Journalism is no longer just about writing great content, it’s promoting it.

That’s conservative blogger Michelle Malkin posing for a photo with a man holding a swastika Obama sign

Some bloggers have to work years to hone their craft in order to build up an audience of thousands, while others just come up with a “concept” blog which instantly becomes a huge A-list site, presumably followed by lots of cash. The best of these involve user-submitted content and you only have to post a handful of times a day.

This is why you’re fat, welcome to the A-list. I can’t say you don’t deserve it.

The site, launched only 10 days ago, is currently getting more incoming traffic than Daily Kos.

Let me remind you of something. The definition of a blog is simply a website that publishes updates in reverse chronological order. It is a platform, not a philosophy on journalism or the way the web should work. Time and time again I’ve seen statements like “such-and-such is not a blog because a blogger would never do [insert silly remark here].” Bloggers range from the amateur to the professional journalist. They allow and disallow comments. They link freely or conservatively. They have all sorts of MOs.

This is why I tend to roll my eyes when people start spouting generalities like “blogs aren’t for original reporting, they’re for conversation,” or any of the other myriad similar assertions, curmudgeonly or evangelical. It is a way of delivering content and has nothing to do with the content being delivered.

I surveyed all the posts published on Feb. 9 on Technorati’s Top 10 blogs and found that 50% of the links were to blog posts and blog front pages. Only 4% of the links led to newspaper websites while the remaining 46% led to sites that don’t fit into either of these two categories.

There was a total of 783 links posted on the front pages of these blogs on Feb. 9. Of those, 392 of the links led to blog posts or blog front pages. Newspaper websites were linked to 34 times and all other kinds of sites were linked to 357 times.

If one of the posts linked to a blog on a newspaper website I included that in the blog category. I did not include stats from Huffington Post, since the site is not a blog but a collection of thousands of blogs. For Daily Kos, I only included front page blog posts in my calculations and did not include the thousands of back end diaries.

Of the nine blogs surveyed, Daily Kos had the highest number of links to newspaper sites (24). All other sites had fewer than five and Engadget, Google Blog, and Smashing Magazine all included zero links to newspaper websites. I noticed during my survey that these blogs tended to overwhelming link to previous blog posts published on their own sites.

Below you’ll find the complete stats:

http://www.engadget.com/

# of links to blogs: 82
# of links to newspapers: 0
# of links to other: 28

http://www.techcrunch.com/

# of links to blogs: 55
# of links to newspapers: 2
# of links to other: 71

http://gizmodo.com

# of links to blogs: 83
# of links to newspapers: 3
# of links to other: 37

http://www.boingboing.net/

# of links to blogs: 26
# of links to newspapers: 2
# of links to other: 57

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

# of links to blogs: 3
# of links to newspapers: 0
# of links to other: 18

http://lifehacker.com/

# of links to blogs: 37
# of links to newspapers: 1
# of links to other: 36

http://arstechnica.com

# of links to blogs: 40
# of links to newspapers: 2
# of links to other: 40

http://dailykos.com/

# of links to blogs: 59
# of links to newspapers: 24
# of links to other: 23

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

# of links to blogs: 7
# of links to newspapers: 0
# of links to other: 47