the buzz log

A collective exhale ushered the volatile 2008 out the door this week, although one baby who caused a political storm managed to quietly slip himself out before the end. Meanwhile, a long-time Oprah hoax and high-seas piracy stirred up the Buzz—and the searches—during this transition period.

Mom, Do We Have to Do a Combo Celebration?
Bristol Palin's boy emerged not as the grandson of the first female vice president, but as another December baby who will have to insist that his birthday celebrations remain separate from Christmas. Searches soared for the aptly named Baby Tripp, as well as for his momma (+851%) and all his youthful uncles and aunts. Meanwhile, proud grandma Sarah Palin—already busy defending her future son-in-law Levi Johnston's degree aspirations—used the happy event to warn against teen pregnancy on the governor's website. The message include Bristol calling her newborn "perfectly precious," although the timing itself hadn't been "ideal."

Oprah, Who Can You Believe?
The dominoes finally fell this week after Herman Rosenblat, who had been telling a sweet little story about meeting his wife at the fence of Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany for a dozen years, recanted his story. After a New Republic article raised many questions, publisher Berkley Books (already fooled twice by other authors) canceled his forthcoming memoir, and another publisher offered refunds for "Angel Girl," a children's book inspired by Rosenblat's tale. His hoax had charmed Oprah (twice), who declared his story the "single greatest love story...we've ever told on the air." Hollywood, which always changes the truth anyway, is going ahead with a film project based on the well-meant but discredited tale.

Captain, What Do We Do with the Fertilizer?
Apparently, oil and fertilizer don't mix. Pirates worked on New Year's Day and attacked two crafts. The high-seas bandits got hold of an Egyptian cargo ship with about 6,000 tons of fertilizer, but lost an Indian tanker with a full load of crude oil. The pirates haven't done too well lately: Water jets thwarted armed brigands last Friday, while a December defense, described in this BBC interview, involved cocktail bombs made out of beer bottles. Imagine what could've been done with the fertilizer.

Also buzzing...
  • "Catcher in the Rye" author J.D. Salinger turned 90 on New Year's Day, but remained in hiding for the grand event.
  • Soon-to-be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dropped a Waterford crystal ball on Times Square, accompanied by her husband Bill and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to welcome in the new year.
  • "Deliverance," which made banjo music creepy for men, and "Terminator," which made Arnold Schwarzenegger creepy for everyone, counted among 25 films to be preserved forever at the National Film Registry. Cue "Dueling Banjos."

Filed under: Literature, Pirates, Hoaxes, Recaps, Babies, Week in Review, Wrap Up

In-the-know TV junkies aren't even messing with a DVR anymore. Some aren't even bothering with a TV. Instead of setting up timers to record their favorite show when it airs, Web heads are turning to the treasure trove of shows available for download on black market BitTorrent sites.

Torrent searches spiked over the past week, but we attribute that to movie junkies looking to snag copies of Academy Award-nominated flicks not yet available on DVD. Waxy.org researched the prevalence of Oscar-nominated movies available online and found 31 of the 34 films named by Oscar were out there on the Web in some form.

Interest in serialized TV shows and award-worthy movies are adding up to a perfect storm of Torrent interest. Searches on "bittorrent search" (+720%), "torrent download sites" (+500%), and "torrent search sites" (+210%) all jumped significantly over the last week.

What shows or movies are these scofflaws searching on the most? We steered our Buzz barge into pirate waters to come up with the top 20 torrent searches for the week...

Filed under: Pirates, File Sharing, BitTorrent

We remember the days when Napster and Kazaa ruled over the Buzz. That was only four or five short years ago, but it feels like eons in web time. Peer-to-peer file sharing was damned by the entertainment industry and sued into a dark corner of the Internet. But in the last couple of years, folks who love to download have turned away from P2P sharing in favor of the torrent protocol.

Naturally, movie studios want to stop any sharing of their content, but as with P2P, torrent tracking sites are difficult to stop. Searches on Pirate Bay, a torrent tracking site, surged 133% after the Swedish police absconded with their servers late last week. In response, torrent searchers simply turned their attention to other sites, and we saw increases in buzz on "torrent portal," "isohunt," "demonoid," "torrent reactor," and "mininova." After the rush of traffic on other torrent sites died down a bit, the Pirate Bay came back to life, again proving the futility of trying to quash downloading on the Web.

As for BitTorrent itself, the file-sharing protocol remains popular with Web searchers, safely ensconced in our top 600 searches. It's a male bastion, with dudes accounting for 80% of all BitTorrent interest. Queries follow the well-worn path of file-sharing programs past, spiking every weekend as folks focus on downloading during their time off. Will torrents stay strong and buck the tide of past file-sharing protocols? We'll continue to download the data to see...

Filed under: Business, Pirates, File Sharing