Recession is now being discussed again.

I vaguely remembered that there was an academic study of the correlation between number of published news articles and the occurrence of recession. I believe the conclusion is that the article numbers is probably a good leading indicator to a looming recession.

Todays, can we use the blogsphere as a data source? A quick Google search gave the following result:

Year	Count
‘07	133,933
‘06	66942
‘05	19049

It is a very rough sketch. It did not take into account the blog entries that existed during the surveyed time period. It did not check the context either.

But if blogshpere serves as a place for collective rumbling, maybe there are messages to be mined out of it.