noteworthy wrote:

If you compare johnny cash and thomas friedman over the last two months, you'll find that Thomas Friedman has about as much "influence" on the blogosphere as the late Johnny Cash. Interestingly, you'll also find that a curiously large percentage of the peaks and valleys coincide on the two graphs, suggesting that other factors are at work. The same can be said for sheryl crow. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. This isn't exactly a well-groomed data set.

All your points are valid.. BlogPulse isn't exactly the greatest way to gauge interest in a given subject accurately. There are cases when you can see a sudden surge of interest, but that's about it. The hurricanes are a good example of that. However, there is another metric available to us that is quite telling.

In the web statistics for MemeStreams, we have seen a very noticeable surge of inbound search engine traffic for all posts that mention NYT columnists such as Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. This implies that people are looking for posts in the blogs that are quoting material from their columns, via bloggers who are actually paying for the TimesSelect service. This post will get a significant number of hits just because I mentioned their names.

If there is any dispute that Johnny Cash is way more important than Thomas Friedman, it would be a slightly refined version of your query that searches for "thomas friedman" as opposed to just "friedman". Johnny Cash is part of the background radiation of American culture, where Friedman is at best part of its more informed business and foreign policy dialogue.

Johnny Cash is way more important than Thomas Friedman