The Killing of a Terrorist
Within minutes of the announcement that U.S. forces had killed Iraqi-based al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the blogosphere starting popping. If you check out the BlogPulse Live graph on the home page, in fact, you'll notice a uptick in blog discussions about "politics" (the orange line on the graph), which encompasses any mention of the war in Iraq and related issues.
An internal BlogPulse tool that tracks blog posts as they're published shows these keywords dominating the list of most common phrases in blog posts by 9:30 a.m.: abu, musba, al-zarqawi, iraq, airstrike, osama, al-qaida, al-qaeda, Baquba (the Iraqi city where al-Zarqawi was killed), terrorist, beheaded, bombing and Bagdhad, among others.
The fallout?
Omar at Iraq the Model resorts to all-capital letters to proclaim: "CONGRATULATIONS TO IRAQ, CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WHOLE WORLD ON THIS VICTORY." The blogger at Military News provides the military talking points, while in a counterpoint post, the Current Era Blog reports that as recently as this week (before today's news), some military officials were saying the war in Iraq is already lost.
A BlogPulse trend graph indicates that while al-Zarqawi was a central figure in the terrorist movement, the movement is perhaps bigger than one man.
Posted by Sue MacDonald at June 8, 2006 09:58 AM
