Blogs Focus on Volcano, Polish Plane crash, and Obama v. Press

Bloggers' attention was evenly divided among three different subjects last week -- something that doesn't often happen in social media where attention has a way of amassing around one or two stories.

From April 12-16, the Icelandic volcano, the crash that killed the Polish President and Barack Obama's handling of the media at the nuclear summit each received 13% of the week's links, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. This marks the first time in nearly half a year-since last November-without a single subject accounting for more than 13% of the blogosphere links in a given week. One of last week's top subjects was the volcanic eruption in Iceland that delayed thousands of flights throughout Europe. Most bloggers linked to a single BBC story about travel consequences; some even shared how the disruptions impacted them personally. The eruption also generated significant mainstream media coverage last week, finishing as the No. 2 story in the News Coverage Index. Another lead story in the blogosphere was the death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and many other senior Polish officials in an April 10 plane crash in Russia. For the most part, bloggers shared their sympathy and thoughts on the tragedy. A few, however, focused on theories sprinkled throughout the Web suggesting that the crash was not an accident and that somehow Russia was involved.