Palin, Iraq Dominate Social Media

Blogs, Twitter and YouTube last week each led with very different stories, and none of them overlapped with the leading subjects in traditional media, according to the New Media Index by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. While the mainstream press attended to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, social media showed very little interest in the largely drama-free proceedings. There, Sarah Palin and Iran were the biggest topics along with a number of unusual stories on subjects such as manipulative cats, hungry robots and Twitter technology. In fact, of the top 10 stories in the traditional press last week, only one-the health care debate-also showed up among the leading stories in the blogosphere or on Twitter.