“When Steve Irwin, the famous crocodile hunter, was killed by a sting ray, 5.5% of the posts on that day in the blogosphere (September 05, 2006) mentioned his name. Yesterday, mentions of ‘Michael Jackson’ topped out around 3%. Things are heading north from there today – currently around 8% – but note that the more immediate statistics come with a higher margin of error due to the lower sample size.”

About Matthew Hurst: “Scientist at Microsoft’s MSN; co-creator of BlogPulse.”

“BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. Blogs, a term that is short for weblogs, represent the fastest-growing medium of personal publishing and the newest method of individual expression and opinion on the Internet. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs. BlogPulse is brought to you by Nielsen Online. (Read more)