I was interested to read about the increasing influence of blogs, and that 78% of journalists in the USA use blogs as a source of stories....

This information based upon a survey conducted by Brodeur and apparently it also stated that, over half of journalists said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.

This is something that I have blogged about before on Bristol media and it seems that firebrands such as Dizzy Thinks have held sway over journalists tone, but it has been hard to prove.

Surveys are fine but I usually like to deal in results. So where is the proof I ask you say?

Well Kevin Coughlan, being the news hound that he is, has already spotted a major coup by Guido Fawkes. Guido claimed the scalp of Peter Hain last week after revealing his dodgy dealings regarding £100,000 of political donations to his leadership campaign.

But what about closer home. Well the Bristol Blogger and Indie Media regularly scoop stories well ahead of the Bristol Evening Post and herein lies my point. News outlets in the printed form cannot compete with the speed and flexibility of the blog or online media.

Therefore, the future of print must be to provide in-depth analysis and comment and leave breaking news to the news wires and blogs!

It used to be commonplace for an individual to vent their frustrations at the powers-that-be by writing a letter to their favourite newspaper, then cross their fingers that the editor held the same view and hope that the government or blue chip would sit up and pay attention.

I am less convinced by this route and more in favour of setting up a popular blog myself!

Guido Fawkes - political blogger extraordinaire - has an extreme amount of power and influence now. Following my blog on Bristol Media last year, he claimed to have over 250,000 unique visitors (July 07) in the month of July alone!

On Monday morning, Guido mocked Brown's speech where he innumerately claimed that a billion people equalled a third of humanity. The post linked to the speech transcript on the Downing Street website.

Within an hour of that post being published, a Downing Street PR had deleted the wording from the transcript!

Increasingly, bloggers like Guido are driving the news rather than commenting on it. This is due to the fact that many political journalists, and former Labour adviser, such as Benjamin Wegg-Prosser are big fans of his.

So why bother with a note to the editor, when you can write the news yourself?

The best thing to take up your time on the web, apart from Facebook, is Google Trends.

The trends application by Google is another reminder that we are being watched online, and not only by IP trackers and SPAM email merchants. Google and all other search engines watch our online habits closely in order to target us for advertising, for example.

The good news is that we can access this information and make use of it to track where certain people are searching certain words or phrases.

I find this application fascinating.  Analysing the trends in popularity during the presidential race, for example, shows peaks in searches for words and highlights top stories behind the spikes in popularity.

Using this tool, I have found that 'recession' is the current buzz word across the world and in particular the USA, where it outnumbers 'spend' by 2:1.

You can see on the graph below that, internationally, we are now very concerned about recession (in blue) across the globe in comparison to spending cash (in red).

However, if you follow this link, you can see that the Brits are eagerly spending away, especially in London, blissfully unaware of the impending recession which has already started in the USA!

Happy New Year all!

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