After yesterday’s movie/company buzz article, Austin had a great idea:  Do the same thing but for LeBron James and the teams vying to sign him.  Without further ado, below are the results.

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Comparing the amount of articles that mention “LeBron” and the city name, you can see that Miami came on way strong in the final two days.  It seems that the rumor mill was abuzz with LeBron staying in Cleveland or going to Chicago consistently up until recently.  According to the data, it looks like the Knicks or the Nets never stood a chance.

Here is the data of articles that mention “LeBron” and “Ego”.  No doubt this graph will be exponential.

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It’s interesting to see that the media coverage mentioning the other cities dropped so sharply even before the announcement . Is this a sign that the Heat are better at generating buzz, or simply that an early leak led to a fast-moving rumor mill. Either way, LeBron’s ability to generate coverage is impressive. Since the end of the NBA Finals, we picked up over 4,700 articles that mentioned LeBron somewhere in the title. To put that into perspective, we picked up just over 5,000 articles mentioning ‘oil spill’ in the title.  The numbers aren’t a definitive record of all coverage, but they certainly paint an interesting picture.

This week, four big stories have been BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Facebook’s revamped privacy policy, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the series finale of LOST.  To compare each story’s online coverage, I went to Pinyadda’s index and began comparing title strings.

For the oil spill, articles with ‘BP’ and ‘oil’ were matched in titles.  For Facebook’s privacy woes, ‘Facebook’ and ‘privacy’ were matched in titles.  For the World Cup, any article with ‘World Cup’ in the title was counted and for LOST, any article with ‘LOST’ in the title and from the Television category was counted.  Below is a graph comparing my findings on each story since April 20th (weekends not included**).  Click on the graph to see an expected view.

Graph 1- Comparing weekday date to relative total of items.

Some interesting notes on the trends in this graph:

1. As expected, the number of World Cup articles are steadily increasing as the June 12th kick-off slowly approaches.
2. The number of LOST articles sky-rocketed after the series finale.
3. On 5/10/2010, the number of BP oil spill articles had a significant jump.  I can’t figure this out, but hopefully someone (cough Phil Arscott cough) can.

**side note:  weekend dates were not included because the volume of published items from publications is much less compared to weekday dates.  another site note:  have you ever noticed how people choose to spend their weekends?  I was walking through the Common last Saturday and saw a otherwise-together 50 year old man hula hooping by himself.)

Data posts from Pinyadda are created using Pinyadda’s index- a database of article links, titles and meta-data from thousands of websites.  The titles and meta-data are analyzed to determine accurately what the article is about.