The graph tracks blog mentions of Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, and David Brooks over the past month.

This is a really neat graph. What is even more neat is that you can make your own graphs for any keyword!

Daily Kos: The waning influence of the NYT Times columnists

When people ask me why I blog, the answer is that it helps me organize my thoughts, memorialize them, work them out.

In short, to discover what I think.

The Big Picture: Why Write ?

"It's all about the 'memes,' " says Stan Jonas, head of interest rate strategy at Fimat USA in New York... "Those guys say it and about a week or two later, the guys on Wall Street pick it up."

The Big Picture: WSJ: Economists Join Blogging Frontier

Recently, discussions about business models surrounding indexing the blog-o-sphere have been popping up. Much of this has been surrounding Technorati. Doc Sears has a great starting point. Wired has an article about how Technorati is becoming a "utility".

Tom Foremski kicked it all off with this account of a statement from a Technorati PR exec:

"It's all about getting the right algorithm" he said at one point, arguing that Technorati's sophisticated automated services would enable corporations to find out what is being said about them, their people, products, and to respond to bad news very quickly, by engaging bloggers in conversations.

Today the part of General Memetics will be played by Technorati.

Technorati in the news

This is an experiment in using wiki, a relatively new form of Internet interactivity, to bring readers into the process of forming and expressing editorial opinions. "Public Beta" is just a euphemism for "We're just trying this out. Please forgive any problems and give us suggestions for improvement."

I really don't think this is going to work. This is an idea whose time hasn't come.

Welcome to the Los Angeles Times Wikitorial Page (Public Beta)

Kevin Hale of Particletree wrote an interesting essay about the importance of RSS and speculates that the success of social bookmarking sites like MemeStreams have got Google worried about the reputation agent becoming the new search.

Slashdot | The Importance of RSS

John Jay Hooker, the lawyer who delivered the most memorable comment at BlogNashville, has appeared in the blogosphere.

"You can't call a son-of-a-bitch a son-of-a-bitch without calling him a son-of-a-bitch."

John Jay Hooker Blog

] The Chinese Communist Party survived a brutal civil war
] with the Nationalists, battles with American forces in
] Korea and massive pro-democracy demonstrations at
] Tiananmen Square. But now it may finally have met its
] match - the Internet.

Death by a Thousand Blogs - New York Times

] How many bloggers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
] Who knows, but a lot of light bulbs went off when
] 300-plus bloggers met up in Tennessee.

Online Journalism Review's coverage of BlogNashville.

Seven big ideas (and one pet peeve) from BlogNashville

] Bloggers - those Internet-based writers without rules -
] are fighting back against criticism that their work is
] unreliable, libelous or just poorly done.

The AP's odd and defensive take on Blog Nashville.

HeraldNet: Bloggers get a few pointers from real journalists