Let's Hear It For Guys With Weird Names
When Bridget Jones, Harry Potter and Colin Firth lead the list of key people cited in blogs (and two of them are fictional), it's obvious that the high season of politics and presidential elections is officially over. In fact, Sunday's BlogPulse results seemed to sweep in an era focused on guys with weird names.
Getting a hefty amount of notice is first weird-name guy: Russell Jones, a founding member of the rap group Wu-Tang CLan and also known as ODB (for Ol' Dirty Bastard). He collapsed and died in a New York recording studio over the weekend after complaining of chest pains. Other ODB aliases over the years have included Joe Bannanas, Osirus, Dirt McGirt, Unique Ason and Big Baby Jesus.
Out on the left coast, the Gov-a-nator, Arnold Schwarzenegger has moved to No. 19 on Sunday's key people list, based partly on an a move afoot to amend the U.S. Constitution to allow non-U.S.-born citizens to run for President. (Wait, don't Republicans abhor the non-mainstream, Hollywood influence on politics....or was that a dream?)
Obviously, the new Bridget Jones Diary movie was a big hit, seeing that Bridget herself, and co-star Colin Firth, booted major political figures and world leaders out of the top 3 spots among key people.
That's not to say world news isn't on the minds of bloggers. Former CIA agent Michael Scheuer appears as the 6th-burstiest person in Sunday's results, and a Newsday article about the so-called "purge of the CIA" is also among the day's top links. Another of Sunday's top links, an interface called Faces of the Fallen, is a slide show hosted by The Washington Post and featuring photos of all soldiers killed in Iraq since March 2003. Click on each headshot, and the site provides a short biography and a sentence about how each soldier died.
But whatever you do, don't fall for the West Coast Pirate ruse that claims a German car commercial was never aired because of the creepy appearance of a misty ghost during the filming. Go watch it anyway, just for the fun of it. But don't say I didn't warn you.
TREND OF THE DAY: In the browser wars, Mozilla's Firefox is grabbing more and more attention.
BLOGPULSE NEWS: CONVERSATION TRACKER IS HERE! BlogPulse now features a home-page link to one of its showcase technologies, Conversation Tracker. Ever wonder how blog discussions emerge, evolve and get spread around? Let Conversation Tracker show you the thread patterns. It creates a threaded view of a conversation graph from a link to a post or to a new article (or any URL). And please be patient...it takes some time for BlogPulse to find all the information.
Posted by Sue MacDonald at November 15, 2004 10:30 AM