Kottke blogged In 2002, Dave Winer of Scripting News and Martin Nisenholtz of the New York Times made a Long Bet about the authority of weblogs versus that of NY Times in Google:In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.
I decided to see how well each side is doing by checking the results for the top news stories of 2005. Eight news stories were selected and an appropriate Google keyword search was chosen for each one of them. I went through the search results for each keyword and noted the positions of the top results from 1) "traditional" media, 2) citizen media, 3) blogs, and 4) nytimes.com. Finally, the scores were tallied and an "actual" winner (blogs vs. nytimes.com) and an "in-spirit" winner (any traditional media source vs. any citizen media source) were calculated.
Here are the results
| Search Term | Media vs Citizen Media | NYT vs Blogs |
| hurricane katrina | Citizen media | NY Times |
| harriet miers | Media | NY Times |
| london bombing | Media | Blogs |
| iraq election | Media | Blogs |
| terri schiavo | Citizen media | Blogs |
| pope john paul ii death | Media | Blogs |
| gaza withdrawal | Media | Blogs |
| scooter libby indicted | Media | Blogs |
| judith miller jail | Media | Blogs |
Here's the overall results, excluding the Judith Miller search:
Overall winner (in spirit): Media (beating citizen media 6-2).
Overall winner (actual): Blogs (beating the NY Times 6-2).
No comments:
Post a Comment