Jon Stewart’s Humiliation of Tucker Carlson the Most Popular Blog Story of 2004
According to Intelliseek’s BlogPulse, the transcript of comedian Jon Stewart’s October debate with CNN “Crossfire” hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala was the No. 1 “blogged” news item of 2004. Bloggers linked to the “Crossfire” transcript in their online commentaries 1,880 times in 2004, followed by 1,415 references to Slate.com’s “Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore” and 1,174 citations for the BBC’s obituary of radio DJ John Peel.
The data was compiled by Intelliseek’s BlogPulse, an automated blog portal that tracks and analyzes more than two million blogs daily. Blogs, short for weblogs, are easily published web sites that serve as online diaries, journals, newsletters or sources of opinion, information and expertise. By some estimates, the Internet now hosts 5-8 million blogs.
“Blogs are proving to be powerful resources for sharing news and keeping issues alive in the public’s mind,” says Pete Blackshaw, Intelliseek’s chief marketing officer. “CNN reaped a tremendous amount of awareness by making the Stewart transcript available on its web site.” Comedian Stewart hosts Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” During his Crossfire appearance, Stewart lambasted his hosts for reducing the level of public discourse on serious political issues to shouting matches and sound bites.
Bloggers frequently post links to other news stories, blogs or web sites in their regular postings, and tallies of those links determined the BlogPulse.com year-end findings. Other top news stories, in order, were Common Dreams’ “Evidence Mounts That Vote May Have Been Hacked” (Nov. 6; 966 citations), CBS News’ “CBS Names Probe Panel” (Sept. 22; 953) and The Nation’s “100 Facts and 1 Opinion: The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration” (Oct. 30; 783).
Other key findings from the BlogPulse.com 2004 review of the blogosphere:
Top people/personalities (3.9 million among top 100): President George Bush (637,646 citations); Sen. John Kerry (411,977); movie character Harry Potter (333,418); singer Britney Spears (119,661) and film maker Michael Moore (111,876). Others of note: No. 6 Saddam Hussein (85,311); No. 12 Osama Bin Laden (63,003), No. 39 former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (23,649 hits) and radio No. 91 DJ Howard Stern (13, 236 hits).
Top News Sources (2.2 million total among top 100): Yahoo! News (205,093 citations); The New York Times (188,596); BBC (161,805), CNN (144,560) and The Washington Post (113,417). Others of note: No. 14 Fox News (34,915), No. 24 CBS News (19,865), and at No. 85, the English-version web site of Aljazeera.net (6,834).
Top Blogs (527,881 among top 100): BoingBoing: A Directory of Wonderful Things (23,836 citations); DailyKos political blog (21,530); Instapundit political blog (21,391), The Drudge Report news/political blog (19,220); and Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters (18,901).
Top Web Sites (3.9 million among top 100): Hello.com (571,569 citations), Quizilla.com (440,364), Memegen.net (286,362), Amazon.com (255,152) and Go-Quiz.com (217,443). (Many of the top web sites are used by bloggers as resources for quizzes, icons or interactive features they post on their blogs).
