Specifically, we need a counterpart to “meme” that describes erroneous or misleading themes that arise — largely in the mainstream media — until they are corrected by the back-and-forth of the blogosphere. The NYT quote in your opening paragraph is a perfect example.

I nominate “slede“, a contraction of “mis-lede”; defined roughly as fumbling the key thought or “lede” of a news article.

This neologism enjoys a lovely symmetry with Dawkins’ contraction of mimeme to “meme” and its association with “mis-lede” and “mislead” makes it easy to remember.

Usage: The NYT today repeats the slede that “The mainstream media leads and the blogs follow.”

We are rapidly moving to a scenario where there is no ____ media. There will only be content producers, content consumers and content curators/arbiters.

This has the consequence of Bill O’Reilly being forced to compete with funny-captioned cats, but that is your brave new world of equal attention opportunity for content.

Depending on phrases as a tracking mechanism might also be fundamentally flawed. Blogs typically quote reports from mainstream sources. Mainstream sources rarely quote directly from blogs, from my experience in the tech space. Heck, they barely link out to any of them. Certainly I know some stories do get originated out of blogs — I’ve seen this first hand. But if the mainstream sources don’t acknowledge this as much as the blogs do, that can produce a skew.

Still, I guess it’s a start.

Mark, I agree with you but would defend the study, which is only partially focused on the whole MSM vs. blogs thing. There’s a lot of valuable analysis in there, more of which I’ll highlight tomorrow. Glad you’re looking forward to it, Anthony. —Zach

http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/ch-07.htm

During my own qualitative fieldwork, I observed the same phenomenon, which I called “iterative news pyramiding.”

And it seems like this is exactly how you are interpreting the study referenced above:

“The authors describe this as a “‘heartbeat’-like dynamic” or a series of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media.”

So … if we’ve got a theory-based book (Benkler), a deep quantitative analysis (Kleinberg) and qualitative fieldwork (me) all more or less seeing the same thing (called, variously, the pyramiding, jumping clustering, or the heartbeat of news) — well, we may have finally figured something out about the Internet.

And then there’s Twitter, which has a different sort of time horizon and editorial filter (such as http://bit.ly/1665Im).