"New media, old media"

Maybe it's just me, but I'm a little dubious about some of the findings presented by the PEJ in this article.

For starters, they admit that there are "some problems" when it comes to studying the "literally millions of blogs and tweets produced each day" ... This herculean task in and of itself would be problematic enough, but they go on to say that their findings are based on information culled from the Web tracking sites Technorati and Icerocket, one of which (Technorati) "stopped working in early July and [was] down ever since." In other words, half of their year's worth of research came from a single source, which (even though we're still talking about millions of individual bloggers to work with) really doesn't give me much confidence in their ability to provide an accurate assessment of the social-media climate as a whole.

With this being the case, I would suggest that any hard "facts" submitted by the PEJ on the subject of social networking are inherently flawed and should be taken with a huge grain of salt!

Another problem I have with the article is how they attempt to label and categorize the news stories that they are attempting to analyze ... For example, one of their findings suggests that only three percent of blog stories discuss pop culture (a pretty "significant" topic of discussion within the online realm), and another three percent comprise what are described as "oddball" stories; just from personal experience, those numbers seems way too low to me. It starts to make sense, however, when we see what the PEJ highlights as some of their "legitimate" news stories.

Let me provide an example: the article states that "the second-biggest subject on blogs in the year was foreign events," and yet one of the "foreign-event" stories that they choose to highlight is "a vote on the number one song on the Christmas British pop charts" ... Now, that is clearly a pop-culture story, and yet they choose to categorize it under "foreign events" (along with more "appropriate" stories like the protests in Iran).

Another example: "science was the third-largest topic on blogs and social media pages", but they go on to say that "much of the interest here was in off-beat scientific findings" like cats manipulating their owners by purring and the therapeutic qualities of blue M&Ms ... Are these types of stories also counted under the "Oddball" category in addition to "Science"? The article does not say.

Finally, when discussing the subject of "news videos" on YouTube, one of their examples is "an unidentified city council meeting that was interrupted by the sounds of flatulence" ... Like the PEJ, you can call this a "political" video if you'd like, but let's be honest - there's no political discourse or exchange of factual information here. No one is becoming more politically active or gaining awareness of the issues by watching this video. It's a fart joke in video form, and would be a much more accurately categorized as "Oddball" or "Humor" than as "Government" or "Politics and Campaigns."