everybody's talking about it

For those of you that read Canadian news online, you know the The Globe and Mail recently started allowing people to comment on their stories. At least that's most of the time. Sometimes, for certain overly heated topics where people start to get personal and racist, the Globe decides not to allow comments on a story. But most of the time, you can see what the (verbal and often uninformed) masses think about climate change, or Afghanistan, or the Queen of England, or the Ontario peach farming industry.

I often find it interesting to see what it is that people are talking about. So much so, that I actually bothered to write a script that queries the Globe website, sees what articles are being up for comments, and how many comments the stories have received. (It's also a good way to see the headlines without trying to load a page that sometimes crashes my browser.)

Anyway, here's what people are talking about this morning:

Comments as of 9:49 ADT, 18/4/2007
Article	comments/hour	# of comments
Loonie hits highest level since 1978	50.00	10
Southern Ocean drowning in carbon dioxide	12.34	232
Cost of new tanks $1.3-billion, double initial estimate	11.09	112
A House divided against itself: Can it stand?	7.88	36
Arab world debates fate of Canadian brothers	6.97	80
As gas prices soar, so does transit use	6.54	28
Israel pounds Gaza as Hamas, Fatah battle	6.20	19
Britain allows animal-human hybrid embryos	5.06	117
Arrest fails to stem tide of leaks	4.62	19
Wolfowitz to leave World Bank at end of June	4.35	60
Newfoundland held back faulty cancer data	3.55	22
Teen pregnancies drop to a new low, abortions continue decline	2.48	57
Parched Australian farms soak up best rains in a decade	1.75	4

Sometimes, I find it interesting to read the news this way first. Just see what people care about.