Even Reporters Vacations…

One of the things we watch closely here at Maroon Alchemy is the flow of information through our systems. You have your average news days, your strong User Generated Content chatter days with associated memes branching out and your HOLY COW days! What we normally see for is a sine wave. Fairly constant volume Monday – Friday and a sharp decrease over the weekend.

This is our volume coming from traditional media outlets per day through the first few weeks of December.

Here is our volume starting on 12/21 (Monday) through 8:00pm EST Monday (12/28).

Note this marked drop off during the Christmas holidays. What makes this interesting is that there were two (really 1.5) significant events during this period. The first was reaction to the Senate vote on the Health Care bill. Granted, since the actual vote occurred on 12/24 this is really a half an event. But what is really interesting is the fact that on 12/25 we had a failed attempt to blow up an airliner over American soil. That’s a pretty big HOLY COW story with all sorts of ramifications in terms of traditional media. Yet, you see that the daily volume, particularly on the day of the attempted attack and the following day (Friday – Christmas & Saturday) being well below their normal averages.

If it is any consolation, the rest of us took a vacation as well as the User Generated Content and blogosphere showed the same decrease despite the news events. Looking at the Monday numbers, some of us seem to still be on vacation. Heh!