Like AWACS for Memes!

Magazine, pg. 30 of the September 27th dead tree edition:
Bush staff members rely on technorati.com and truthlaidbear.com, which track political blogs and websites to see what items in local papers, on websites and in blogs are getting the most hits. “If a story moves up through the rankings and linking, we can know,” says one of the Bush staff members assigned to alert the rest of the team about which stories are moving through the blogosphere. “We can get indicators about stories before they break elsewhere. It’s like an early-warning system.”
No worries, George: just consider me your white, furry canary in the deep dark coal mine of the blogosphere!
I had thought that Time had mentioned TTLB in their edition this week, as I saw a few hits in my referer logs from them. But since they’ve got their content behind subscriber-only lines, I wasn’t sure. They made me buy an actual hard copy to find out, darn it…
Update: This is actually a rather interesting experiment in old media power. Take a look at my traffic history for the past month. (That’s my “blog only” counter, by the way, which excludes visits to the Ecosystem and other stuff unrelated to my personal blogging on TTLB). The Time piece above hit newstands yesterday, and the online edition showed up on Monday, I believe. See that huge spike in my traffic this week?
Well, of course you don’t, because it’s not there. So a direct, positive mention in one of the largest-circulation news magazines in the country doesn’t result in any really major increase in my traffic.
There’s no way to identify specifically who is visiting the site because of the Time dead-tree edition, of course, since they will just show up with no referer. But I can track those coming from the online edition. And although I did notice a handful of visits, as I mentioned above, it is a tiny, tiny trickle. Right now, for instance, there are no visitors from Time.com in my last 100 visits.
All of which makes you wonder: ignoring Time’s claimed circulation statistics, how many people actually read that paragraph I quote above, either online or in print? Granted, many of Time’s readers probably have no interest in the Internet, or in blogs, and so wouldn’t bother typing in my URL. But it is still pretty striking just how little juice “big” media seems to have when compared to a link from Instapundit or other major bloggers.