So I asked Austin to write an intro for this piece.  He said “No”.  Then Chase and Cheryl laughed.  Then Greg said that the internet was everywhere.  So, in light of all of this, I’ve decided to forgo a introduction and just jump into some data revolving around the latest Wikileaks shenanigans.

First off, what’s the deal with Wikileaks recently and why is it being talked about everywhere?  To get a good snapshot on what is going on, I searched for the most popular words in articles about Wikileaks from the Pinyadda index.

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• Notice the high frequency of “Afghan” and “Afghanistan”.  Recently, Wikileaks released over 92,000 documents relating to the Afghanistan war logs
• Julian Assange is the person behind Wikileaks.
• Bradley Manning is the main suspect in the leak.  Neither Peyton or Eli have been questioned (yet).

Second, which publications have been covering Wikileaks the most since June 1st?

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• The Telegraph was one of the publications that Wikileaks gave the 92,000 documents to originally
• Yahoo! is a content machine-> they publish upwards of 1,000 items a day
• Surprised to see a smaller sites like True Slant and Boing Boing on this list

Over June and July, I kind of forgot about the Afghanistan War and I think there is a direct correlation to the amount it was covered in the press.  If any good comes of this Wikileaks story, I just hope that it is a reminder to one and all that there is a war going on.  Check out the number of mentions about Afghanistan pre-Wikileaks story and post.

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• Notice the sharp increase in Afghanistan articles on 7/26/2010, when the Wikileaks story broke
• The relatively high amount of Afghanistan articles throughout July was surprising to me.  I must have elected to ignore these articles subconsciously.

I then asked Austin to write a conclusion for this piece.  Again, he declined and then Greg said ‘Sucks to suck’.

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