INTERESTING YESTERDAY to watch the news about N. T. Wright's appointment to a New Testament Chair at St. Andrews propagate across the planet in a matter of hours via blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. I saw students in the St. Mary's Quad getting the news from one of their phones and saw congratulations and comments online coming from all over the United States and Britain. Technorati, which used to be useful (before its latest "upgrade") has only just started to index a couple of blog posts. Google Blogs does a lot better, currently listing a little over fifty blog posts. The legacy media did get in on the news yesterday a little: there were notices in the London Times religion blog and BBC Radio One. Google News is better than Technorati, but it wasn't showing these articles yesterday at least in the late afternoon when I last checked. Ruth Gledhill has also published a Times article in the Times. A Guardian blog has taken notice in the last hour. The US media have yet to take any notice. [Update: Forgot to mention one Dutch article this morning. As for local media, the Durham Times had an article out early on too.]
As far as I can tell, PaleoJudaica was the first to pick up the news after the initial annoucement, although my colleague, Steve Holmes put up a blog post within minutes of mine. We did, of course, have advance warning.
An interesting case study for the information age ...