Ever wonder what kind of effect DailyKos has out in the wide-wide-world beyond the great orange choir hall? Well I do, and yesterday I stumbled across a bit of evidence that stopped me in my tracks.
This diary, calling out my US Rep, Bill Delahunt (MA-10), was posted at 7:56AM. At 9:19AM, a Google search on "delahunt impeachment" returned this very diary as the second most relevant result. In fact, I was about to cite it in a comment when I realized that it was my own damned diary. I don't know about anyone else, but to me that was a shock. I guess I'm just stuck in the Google of the 1990's. So anyway, I conducted a little test seeing how fast new diaries pops up in The Google.
Here are the results:
| Diary | posting time | On Google at 10:29? |
| Democracy Now! Blows Apart the Petraeus Testimony | 10:17 | No |
| Tell me why they die | 10:16 | No |
| Presidential Candidate Bracketology | 10:12 | No |
| Obama's Iraq Speech: Excerpts Just Hit the Press | 10:02 | No |
| Why Doesn't the DNC Threaten to PUNISH New Hampshire?? | 09:55 | yes |
So by the evidence of that unscientific test, it takes between 27 and 34 minutes for a diary on dkos to appear on The Google.
Beyond the raw speed, which is amazing, if you think just about the sample search cited above - "delahunt impeachment" - the implications are enormous. Anyone wondering what Bill Delahunt thinks about impeachment is going to see my diary about the subject at the top of the search results within a half hour of my posting it.
I would think this makes War Rooms and Rapid Response Teams obsolete for anything except inside-the-beltway Broderist consensus-building.