Watching It All In Real Time
January 6th, 2005Today, we added a new feature to the frontpage: the Subscription of the Day (SOTD). I’m very excited about it because it was one of the first projects that I took on and will work with every day.
I also got a real-time perspective of how stories unfold in the blogworld and then eventually make it to the mainstream press. The big new of the day was that Six Apart was rumored to be buying Live Journal. The story started last night and continued throughout the evening, with the chunk of the discussion happening this morning and afternoon. Of course, this was the SOTD, and I wanted to make sure that created the correct query, so I threw it onto my sidebar and watched the action flow in real time. Here’s how it went down:
First, there was shock. Posts like “No way is this happening” and “this is incredible news”. This led to questions such as “why would 6A do this?” and “I thought they were moving more into the enterprise business.” After that, the Slashdot post nullified the rumor, which slowed down the talk a bit (but not much). The speculation was enormous. Finally, at 3:00EST, Eweek jumped on board with an “official” article saying that the deal will be announced tomorrow. After that, the posts from blogs linked to the Eweek article, citing it as proof that the deal was not just speculation.
I was glued to my computer all day (not unlike any other day this week), as my eyes kept shifting over to the sidebar to read where this story was going to go next. It was surreal.
Oh, I didn’t realize that Eweek had a special section dedicated to weblogs, plus an feed which follows “collaboration and messaging news”. Subscribed.