Palin vs. Conan vs. Cowell a media buzz showdown

As you may know this week was bustling with gossip and headlines surrounding a few big names. NBC pushed Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show back so Leno could have his old spot, which Conan subsequently walked away from. Simon Cowell is leaving American Idol after this season. And the lovely Sarah Palin is joining Fox News as an analyst.

After a week of big headlines filled with even bigger names, our team was curious to see which name stole the spotlight when it came to online buzz. Before I run the numbers I am going to take a guess and rank them.

1. Conan
2. Palin
3. Cowell

Drum roll please.

What do you know, I was right! Conan was the most referenced celebrity in articles indexed this week, Palin was a close second, and Simon Cowell, well just couldn't keep up.

All three contestants were trending topics this week on twitter, but only two were fortunate enough to be covered by mashable. Here is an analysis of twitter stats on the the news of Cowell leaving Idol. Conan was just too easy though, his letter to the people was an enormous hit, and his most recent shenanigans have the internet world abuzz. And I really just don't have much to say about Sarah, other than she looks pretty feisty in the above picture.

Once thing is clear though when looking at the crazy amount of content (well over a thousand items) surrounding these people, publishers love drama!

Welcome to IA

Hello World. I’d like to introduce myself before getting into the inaugural Information Architecture blog post. My name is Greg and I am in charge of Ops and IA here at Pinyadda. I will be writing a weekly post (Friday mornings with Sliggity) with the goal of keeping you up to date on all things content. Phew, let’s get into it.

We hit a big milestone this week by crossing the one million mark in items indexed. First million is always the hardest, right? We have been increasing our content at an alarming rate and adding many new sites a day. During these weekly posts I will be summarizing a few of the big sites in hopes that you will add them to your Pin and explore a new realm of content. I will also touch upon some of our challenges and highlight our indexing numbers as well as those of our competitors (big numbers guy, I hate text).

As we expand rapidly one of the major challenges we embark on is the organization of our content. We do not want to simply index like Google and throw a firehose of information at you. Every item that comes in is carefully classified in real time by our taxonomy, which is constantly evolving as trending topics are surfaced throughout the web (and no, we don't use Twitter). This will ensure that you will find exactly what you are looking for in exactly the place you thought it would be. We're constantly adding more content based on our extremely complex standards, also known as a set of algorithms I came up with while studying at Babson, locked in the Cutler Center for days with only a keyboard and the classifieds section of a newspaper. Just kidding. We rely on a few simple metrics, our brains and your suggestions to discover and deliver the most valuable and trusted sites on the web to you.

New Sites, Week of 10/19/09 – 10/22/09:

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Raleigh News & Observer, Hartford Courant, Austin-American Statesman, Investor's Business Daily, Tennessean, Fresno Bee, The Palm Beach Post, The Press-Enterprise, Democrat & Chronicle, Birmingham News, Illinois Daily Herald, Des Moines Register, The Honolulu Advertiser, Los Angeles Daily News, Asbury Park Press, Florida Times-Union, Providence Journal, The Salt-Lake Tribune

(Free Pinata to anyone who can spot the trend in this week’s new sites)

As I’m sure you have many other interesting pieces of content to get into this morning, I am going to wrap this up. Please post comments or send me an email greg at pinyadda dot com, I’d love to hear new site suggestions and your views on IA.

Cheers,

Sligs