The blog tracker Technorati has a new tool we may find useful in the months ahead, charts showing the number of references in blog posts to a specific name or word.
Here, for example, is the measure of mentions of “Bill Sali” – the Idaho representative – in blogs over the last six months.
Posts that contain Bill Sali per day for the last 180 days.
Get your own chart!
You might have thought that as election season moved on and the summer doldrums approached, that references to Sali (and other politicians) would have diminished. Not so; in fact, they seem to be rising.
What about other Northwesterners? What’s the pattern for, say, Oregon Senator Gordon Smith?
Bigger, more sweeping, but similar in dynamic:
Posts that contain Gordon Smith per day for the last 180 days.
Get your own chart!
But some follow ore expected patterns. Moving to the statehouse level, let’s check the pattern for Washington House Speaker Frank Chopp, a figure well known in that state’s politics but not so much elsewhere.
Posts that contain Frank Chopp per day for the last 180 days.
Get your own chart!
This tracks remarkably closely to the periods of high interest and activity in the Washington Legislature.
We’ll be revisiting this useful tool.
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