On Google Trends one can find what people and subjects are most queried in the search engine. American journalists paid great attention to these trends. They frequently checked how many people had read their weblogs and subsequently they checked Google Trends for popular queries. In election times, one man was forerunner of the Google Trends charts: Barack Obama.

So if journalists wanted to maintain or increase the amount of people reading their blog, they needed to place “Obama” in the header of their article. And they all did, from The Boston Globe to the conservative Drudge Report; without embarrassment they made Obama their subject.

McCain’s poverty tour harvested very limited attention because “poverty” ranked very low in Google’s Trends as well as subjects like Global Warming. Only when McCain put Obama as a Hollywood celebrity, blogging journalists picked up on the subject.

So this election year became also the year in which the hyperspeed of the weblog dictated the pace and content of the discussion. A trend with the most important feature that it could only amplify itself.

source: NRC, 15 nov 2008.