Blogs ROCK the Word World

It's official: blogs are happenin', blogs are hip, blogs are where it's at! According to Merriam-Webster, a company that knows a thing or two about words, "blog" was the most searched-for word on the Internet in 2004. Exact counts aren't available, but M-W guesses at least tens of thousands of hits a month for the word in search engines. Bloggers rule!

What doesn't rule, at least one month later, are the U.S. Presidential elections. Where election-related personalities or government officials used to occupy most of the key people in BlogPulse's daily findings through October and November, today's key people list includes only three of the players from the Nov. 2 vote: President Bush, Sen. John Kerry, and filmmaker Michael Moore. Instead, celebrities, movie stars and a Jeopardy! winner/loser are taking over.

From the bizarre news department comes word of the untimely death of 24-year-old Paul Peterson, who apparently died when a lava lamp he'd left on a stove exploded and sent a piece of glass through his heart. Which leaves me speechless.

Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak wonders why Hollywood seems speechless, too, over the murder of an Amsterdam filmmaker who attempted to expose the poor treatment of women in the Muslim community. His "Hush Over Hollywood" opinion piece in Human Events Online is Tuesday's fourth popular link in BlogPulse.

So you say you want to get involved in a project of some sort? So did students at Yale, who pulled a prank on Harvard and put up a web site to memorialize it. Or if it's looking-ahead projects you're keen on, how about folding together a 12-sided calendar?

For the day's most non-sensical BlogPulse link, try singing along to the Llama Song. Not musically inclined? Then view the film clip How to Kill a Mockingbird. (Is it me, or do some people have waaay too much time on their hands???)

TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: Now that blogging is the top word of the year, how are the various blog portals faring? BlogPulse, I'm proud to announce, is moving up in the world.