Firefox Browser is Only Slightly Hotter Than Ashlee Simpson
I'm not sure who my audience is on this post, but I think academics, drummers, and Ashlee Simpson followers might like this one. At least I got a kick out of it. In any case, the graph below was generated using BlogPulse tools. Now there about 5 millionish blogs out there (give or take some ... about the same order of magnitude as the population of Dallas or Chicago). You can basically poll to see what percentage of blogs contained a particular term in a longitudinal view (i.e., over a period of time). Instant event study-like research for academics! Didn't research whether there is selection bias or not in terms of the blog platforms polled by BlogPulse, but it is kind of a cool tool.

Anyway, I find it pretty interesting that the blog market is a mostly efficient market in terms of reporting news (I did not graphically superimpose dates of actual events, but it looks about right). You can see bumps related to the Saturday Night Live/drummer miscue/Ashlee Simpson event and also the new Firefox browser news. I also find it interesting that Firefox had a higher spike than Ashlee Simpson. That's pretty sad for us with technical bents to us.

If you run a Ashlee Simpson vs. a Becker-Posner query, well Ashlee wins hands down here.

Updated: Of course, here's a Kerry-Bush-Ashlee runoff to put things into an even greater perspective ...

Steve Shu
Managing Director
S4 Management Group
Email: sshu@s4management.com
Web: http://www.s4management.com