Nick Lewis: The Blog

My accusations against CNN are not politically motivated. I am not, and never will be connected to any right wing attack groups. I am, in fact, actively seeking ways to use the blogosphere as a weapon against right wing attack groups. I am the founder and chief administrator of one of the blogosphere's most well known left wing alliances. I am also listed partner and ally of the Progressive Democrats of America. I've been accused of many things in my day, but I've never been accused of being aright-wing henchman. My motivation is simple: I don't like the idea of always having to second guess whether someone is real, or a marketer. The idea of a major network using blackhat techniques to influence search engines makes me uncomfortable. It was my judgement that this behavior needed to be stopped as quickly as possible. Thus, I decided to make my case, for the record.

My investigation into CNN's possible guerrilla marketing campaign went national today. In the past 6 hours, the story has been picked up by some little names like Wonkette, Metafilter, TechDirt, and Ad-Land. Since this story is spreading like wildfire, CNN's PR people will likely respond to my request for a denial or confirmation. My guess is that they will deny it.

Anyhow, while I wait for the verdict, I wanted to answer a question I recently received: "why does 10 spams mean anything when there are over 10 million weblogs?"

First of all, most of the blogs in that statistic are dead, and haven't been updated in years. As I mentioned earlier, these spams have targeted mid-to-high level bloggers. CNN appears to have ignored all but the top 1000 bloggers (I'm #876 last time I checked).

So we take 13/10,000,000 to 13/1000 and we have something that seems more significant. Now consider how many blogs have even discussed CNN at any length? According to Blog Pulse, CNN is mentioned on every day on average by 0.15% of the 10,032,827 blogs its identified. Read this list of the posts that Blog Pulse is using to create that statistic. I am yet to find a case in which CNN is being mentioned as anything besides a source of news.

I'm going to kickback and watch the best news show on TV, PBS's Frontline. You can watch the full show online here. Here's their blurb:

After surviving one of the roughest presidential elections in modern times, President George W. Bush singled out one member of his team in particular, calling Karl Rove the campaign's "architect." But Rove, a longtime Bush adviser and confidant, is much more than a political guru, he is also the single most powerful -- and ambitious -- policy adviser in the White House. [watch video]

Best Headline -- Ever. All praises to Chief Blogging Officer for making me laugh.

a cattus vesica salus!