Bloggers Focus on Congressional Vote

In a very rare confluence of events, the same subject led the conversation on both blogs and Twitter last week. And voices from both ends of the political spectrum were actually in agreement. While the mainstream press focused on the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, social media galvanized around a vote in the House of Representatives on whether to extend the Patriot Act. From February 7-11, that was the top story on both blogs (with 17% of the news links) and Twitter (21%), according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

That marks the first time in almost 11 months that any subject was No. 1 on both Twitter and blogs in the same week, and only the fifth time since PEJ began its New Media Index in January 2009. Concern for civil liberties transcended politics here as bloggers and twitterers on both the left and the right cheered the February 8 vote in the House which fell short of the super-majority needed to reauthorize the Patriot Act. (A week later, however, both the House and Senate passed a bill extending the Patriot Act for an additional 90 days.)