Short but Spectacular Online Life of Sarah Palin

There is no doubt that Sarah Palin has been one of the most interesting personas of the presidential race that has come to its end in the US this week. She was one of the most fascinating subjects and reporters covered almost every step Sara Palin did during the campaign.

Now that the campaign is over, I think it is safe to predict that interest in Sarah Palin will start to subside slowly and we will probably see much less of the Alaska Governor mentions online but there is no doubt that there were lots of truly fascinating moments in this short yet magnificent life of the Republican vice president hopeful online. In this post I just wanted to summarize this amazing popularity of Sarah Palin online.

First of all, it is important to mention that Sarah was a huge traffic-driving factor for enormous number of publications and was no doubt one of the most fascinating factors making the campaign truly interesting. LA Times Web Scout blog even compared Sarah Palin with Santa Claus for the media people where every day was like Christmas - full of news that allowed us to never run out of ideas for stories. And now the Christmas is over and everything will be boring politics and economics news again.

To a certain extent I felt ashamed about the media people falling for every smallest story related to Sarah Palin as both traditional media and the blogosphere eagerly started to discuss every single mistake she made no matter how true (or not) it actually was. But while I feel uncomfortable about the media people turning smallest stories into huge issues (and definitely not because I am a woman supporting another woman - that is definitely not the issue with me and I don’t think women should support each other only because of sharing the same gender), I think there are good reasons for media people to do just that as we tend to write what our audiences want to read. And Sarah Palin was exactly the focus of attention for millions of people during the presidential race - so news publications produced multiple stories to appease this curiosity.

Internet was engaged in discussions of just about everything - Palin’s way too expensive clothes to her hacked private email account, her daughter’s pregnancy, and lack of knowledge that Africa was a continent and not a country. All of these could easily grow into fascinating subjects to discuss for days in a row - and that was exactly what we saw happening.

And of course with this type of attention from the media people it is no wonder to see how the web is now populated with mentions of Sarah Palin everywhere. I have searched some of the most illustrative places online to try and find some figures proving this popularity is really here. And there it was, of course.

This is what the search on Google Insights for Search shows. While Sarah Palin was virtually non-existent for the internet users until August, during the last few months her name was obviously searched for very heavily by many Americans.

And while Sarah was understandably mostly popular among people in Alaska, the overall interest to her personality has been rather strong in the entire country as we can see on this map:

Google itself proves immense popularity of John McCain running mate currently producing 53 million search results for Sarah Palin compared to only 15.5 million results for Joe Biden. And it is definitely worth noting that all of these results send us to web contain generated during the very short period of her presence in the national politics.

A similar picture is on Digg as well with a total of 235 front page stories featuring Sarah Palin. And everyone more or less familiar with Digg algorithm should know how huge the number of submitted stories should be to ensure this kind of Digg fame for this one person. For comparison, Joe Biden only appeared in headlines and descriptions of 37 popular stories on Digg with many of them only mentioning him near Sarah as her democratic counterpart.

Also Sarah Palin’s official page on Facebook enjoys almost half a million of supporters with numerous installs of various Sarah-related applications there as well.

And even the technology blogosphere did not want to be left behind the huge number of people seeking for additional information about Sarah Palin. As a result, stories by various bloggers and reporters mentioning Sarah Palin in their titles and short summaries made it to Techmeme 43 times. After all, many bloggers admitted that Sarah Palin ensured them record numbers of visitors to their posts from search engines so even those bloggers focused on technology and not on politics or celebrities clearly wanted to participate.

The most important story for the technology blogosphere was obviously Palin’s private email account on Yahoo Mail hacked by a Tennessee student with emails leaking to the world for everyone to view. This was obviously a joyful event for the tech blogosphere as we immediately got a hint on how to write about Sarah Palin and still stick to technology. Yahoo Mail was the answer for everyone so we happily started discussing how the account had been hacked, what emails were about and how the police investigated the situation and later the court ruling as well - everything got attention from tech bloggers.

What’s more, Sarah was even granted a whole meme on Twitter called Little Known Facts about Sarah Palin. For a whole day Twitter users competed in creating the funniest fact about Alaska Governor and sending them as tweets for everyone (but Sarah presumably) to enjoy. To tell you the truth, the entire deal looked more like a mob behavior from the social media crowd where no one cared about other person’s feelings and everyone only wanted to hurt someone the most.

Finally, there is even a dedicated room on FriendFeed for Sarah Palin - though that one is tiny with only 4 members. And unfortunately given the fact that the campaign is now over chances are the room will not be growing any more. I believe the blogosphere will now find another target to hunt for and discuss everywhere.

And the question now is: is it the end of Sara Palin’s amazing online appearance or she will continue to generate enough interest with her actions to keep people interested. Of course it depends on the future of her political career but one has to admit that Sarah has done amazingly well to draw attention of people - even though it is hard to tell if that attention was actually good or bad for the Republican presidential candidate.

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