Check out our featured Crawdad Listening Posts™!

June 20, 2007
Sightings, conspiracies, and an abducted cow? Is it the release of Twister II? No, it's this week's featured Listening Post on UFOs. The big buzz on the net in the last week is the Flying Blimp over Salt Lake City. For a good laugh, check out the video.

June 14, 2007
Whatchagoonado? The hit TV series "The Sopranos" came to an end last Sunday, and all of TVland is abuzz about the ending. Here's a Sopranos Listening Post for those of you who are seeking clues about what the final scene really meant...

June 8, 2007
I asked my 14 year old son what subject I should use for the featured Listening Post. He said, “World of Warcraft. Try and figure out why it’s so incredibly popular, that would be useful.” OK, so here’s the LP for WoW. For those not in the know, World of Warcraft, or WoW for short, is the most popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) in the world, citing some 8.5 million worldwide players. So what’s the current buzz on WoW? The first thing I noticed about the Blogosphere buzz on WoW is that apparently we have a strong, virtual gold trading market. “Gold” can be used in WoW for improving skills, buying weapons and defenses, etc. Beginning players especially are willing to lay down real bucks for game gold, hence creating a link between virtual and real economies. Where there’s money, there’s corruption—over one hundred thousand accounts were recently banned for “bot” activity. A lot of people mention WoW in passing, as in “The reason you haven’t heard from me this week is because I’ve been spending 20 hours a day in WoW…” In fact, the Listening Post points out the happy words of “sleep”, “today”, and “problem”, indicating people are happy talking about WoW and their (lack of) sleep… but grumpy when they’re talking about WoW and “work”. WoW and work apparently don’t mix...nor WoW and love.

June 4, 2007
Today's Listening Post features party girl Lindsay Lohan. Lindsay was doing pretty well at the beginning of the month, having been named #1 sexiest in Maxim magazine's Hot 100, but her arrest on May 26 provides some interesting insight into the world of celebrities in Web 2.0. First, you'll note on the time chart for tone that sentiment for her tanked immediately that day. Although there's been a bit of a recovery in the last week, she has lost about 40% of her positive sentiment, going from around 14% positive before the arrest (pretty good for a celebrity) down to 8% afterwards (anything below 10% for a celebrity is a red flag). Volume peaked on May 29, thus it took about 3 days for the buzz to really stir in the blogosphere. Finally, one of the "hot words" this past month was Paris (Hilton)--despite trying to differentiate herself from Paris, people now see Paris and Lindsay as one and the same in our gossipy, paparazzi world.

May 30, 2007
How's Barack Obama doing in the blogosphere? Looks pretty good to us, so far. Watch for Crawdad's special 2008 Presidential Campaign site, coming soon.

May 30, 2007
The big new movie release of the summer is Pirates of the Caribbean. Here's the LP for the movie's buzz. Looks like people think the movie is too long, but they love those special effects, and of course, Johnny Depp.

May 15, 2007
Our friends at Wallstrip.com have been purchased by CBS. Here are some guest comments we made on Howard Lindzon's blog, concerning Marvel Comics, Jones Soda, and Kelloggs.