Email and Nobel Dominate the Blogs

It was a tale of two very different stories leading the blogosphere last week. One, an Internet security breach with global implications, revealed the communal nature of the social media that allows users to alert and even try to protect one another. The other, President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, highlighted the blogosphere's proclivity for commentary and opinion that runs the gamut from racial to philosophical. On Monday, October 5, BBC News reported that thousands of email accounts had been compromised as their passwords had been posted online. In a scheme commonly referred to as "phishing," Internet scammers persuaded unsuspecting victims to pass along their private email account information, which was then posted on a public Web site. By Tuesday, the BBC reported the scam had compromised at least 30,000 email addresses around the world. The story galvanized bloggers around an event that the mainstream press had all but ignored. For the week (October 5-9), fully 45% of the links to news-related stories from blogs were about that subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, one of the biggest stories of the year in social media. That number, indeed, was the fifth-largest weekly total for any particular story this year, and the highest for any subject since the political protests in Iran made up 63% of the top blog links the week June 15-19.