Kevin and Paul over at WizBang have made an astute observation in the wake of the Nick Berg beheading. WizBang is hosting, and has linked to others who are hosting the Nick Berg video. As a result their traffic has spiked incredibly over the last couple of days. Here’s a graph of WizBang’s hits over the last month:
As you can see they went from a daily average of well under 20,000 hits to over 300,000 so far today! The vast majority of the traffic spike is due to search engines picking up sites where the video can be found. Note how far down WizBang is in that list of results. And I thought it was bad when Google set me a few thousand visitors when I posted the Janet Jackson pics.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that the traditional media is clearly not meeting the needs of the public. That’s not very surprising to me given that all the American media corporations are just cogs in the machine. But in come the blogs to the rescue. Paul makes the following observation:
For those of you that have the ability to host it, I’d urge you to consider it. Perhaps you thought is was too ghoulish or maybe you did not want the bill. Both reasons are valid. (as well as the other 10,000 out there) But consider my point… This is an opportunity. The blogosphere got a jump start on Sept. 11, 2001. It got a kick in the pants during the Iraq war. This is an incredible opportune to advance it again. It is introducing thousands of new people to blogs. The more we can serve an informational need the larger we become. By diversifying the hosting, we better serve that need.
If you host it -even if only for a few hours- you are helping the blogosphere provide more information than the big media is. Think about it.
*BTW- Above I said, “If the blogosphere is to ever obtain the status so many people want it to obtain it is events like this that will propel us there.” Obviously I did not mean trading on the ghoulish deaths of innocents. I meant taking advantage of when we can provide information or a service that other media can’t.
What would we do without the internet? The media always seems to try to protect us from material that they deem to be inappropriate for mass consumption, but judging by all this traffic they’re missing out on they’d better rethink their position before they get bypassed all together on a regular. As Kevin said, big media has failed us.