I wrote a piece on mining the blog sphere for general sentiment of fear of recession, or the lack of it, back in September last year.

I revisited this subject, and surprise, surprise, here is the new set of figures:


It is just like economic data: it can be revised!

A bit of explanation of the table of data here: back in Sep ‘07, when I searched for total number of blog posts contained the word “Recession”, says, for 2007, Google reported that there are 133,933 article. (As shown in the column “#Post as of Sep 07”). The figure, obviously, indicated blog posts created from Jan 2007 to 5, Sep 2007 only.

When I repeated the same search, the number of blog posts of 2007 has actually gone down, event though the time covered is full four quarters. Could it be caused by Google changing their search algorithm again, or people are actually withdrawing their blogs?

Nonetheless, from the relative change in the number of posts we can see a general rise in the awareness of the recession (be it we are in it now or it is going to happen). In the first month of ‘08, the number of posts covering Recession is almost 4/5 of the total number in 2007.


(Seems like it is not easy to construct a table in blogger)