Olympics fetish. Why is an old story from December 2007 about nude Olympic swimmer photos floating to the top off the Daily Tele charts? Three out of the top 10 are about Laure Manaudou. Three words. Googling smut seekers with an Olympics fetish? And once they appear in the Top 10 the Tele’s demographic just keep on clickin’. — Neil Walker 

Entertainment, Tassie-style! Strange that the Hobart Mercury would file this story under ‘Entertainment’ on their website. Could well be quite an entertaining activity, but that’s not for newsfolk to suggest surely. 

Do young journos have a future? And Will It Be Dumb? After a recent talk I gave at my alma mater to the UCLA Daily Bruin newspaper staff. Notebooks in hand, the students peppered me with questions about whether graduate school was worth it and if the news was destined to be a sea of dumbed-down sound bites. — Editor and Publisher

NBCU, Yahoo sites ring in Olympics with traffic record. American sports fans are turning to the Web to follow the 2008 Summer Olympics in droves, setting as many records as have the Olympic swimmers over the first four days of the Beijing games, according to figures compiled by Nielsen Online and NBC Universal. — MediaWeek

How popular bloggers get bureaucratized I’ve recently been reading Making Online News — a book of ethnographic studies of online news production. Tucked towards the back of the book is a chapter called “The Routines of Blogging” by Wilson Lowrey and John Latta. This is one of the few studies I’ve seen that examines the work practices of bloggers (specifically, political bloggers), rather than journalists. Their findings support what I’ve increasingly suspected about popular blogs: “The more relevant bloggers become in terms of audience and influence, the more their production routines resemble those of professional journalists.” — Poynter Online

Newspapers and twitter Some newspapers have been experimenting with Twitter since its early days (you know, two years ago) and the number of newspaper-affiliated accounts continues to grow, according to Erica Smith’s stats. It’s up to 303. That sounds great. Newspapers innovating with a new technology. Rah, rah! But Smith’s stats also show newspapers haven’t figured out to be very effective. The average number of followers of her newspaper list is 132 followers per account. — Random Mumblings