In case you haven’t visited the Google homepage today (as if that were how you got all your news), it’s World AIDS Day today.
According to Google Blog Search, over 13,000 blogs have talked about World AIDS Day in the last 24 hours. That’s more than participated in Blog Action Day 2008, which focused on poverty.
Some indications of mass blog participation and the impact of social media on this event:
- BlogPulse is showing a major spike in mentions of “aids” or “World AIDS Day.”
- AIDS.gov has a blog at the official website for the US government’s AIDS prevention and information resource.
- Bloggers Unite, a service of BlogCatalog, has recruited the BlogCatalog user base of tens of thousands of people to participate in World AIDS Day.
- Technorati shows dozens of high-authority blog posts discussing World AIDS Day 2008 in the past couple of days.
- “World AIDS Day” is one of Twitter’s hottest phrases right now.
It’s incredible to me how the Web continues to change the way people learn about, participate in and spread awareness of events like World AIDS Day.
How did you find out about World AIDS Day 2008? I’ll bet it wasn’t through your morning newspaper. More likely it was through some form of social media. Even if mainstream media alerted you to it, you probably sought and found gobs of information about it via your favorite social media sources.
Worldwide, more than 33 million people currently have AIDS. I wonder how many of them have access to social media.
I wonder what those numbers will be on December 1, 2018. I hope the first one is much smaller.
Disclosure: Easton Ellsworth is currently doing blog consulting work for Bloggers Unite and its parent, BlogCatalog.
