Twitter-Watching Gone So, So Wild
Almost immediately after the Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag reported that Twitter might be in acquisition talks with Apple, everyone jumped on the rumor, from traditional media like the New Zealand Herald to United Press International to – ahem – Reuters (peHUB's parent). So did blogs like All Things Digital, Ubergizmo and Mashable. (In defense of the blogs, they mostly splashed cold water on the latest round of “late-stage negotiations” involving the microblogging startup.) I saw so much talk about the company Tuesday that I took a quick look through Google News in an attempt to measure the impact of Valleywag’s story. Know how many related news articles popped up? Fully 140, 84 of them in U.S.-based outlets. That search prompted me to conduct a few others, first on Factiva, which aggregates many -- but by no means all -- news sources, and then on Google Trends, a relatively new search index.
