According to ReadWriteWeb, a five-year-old bet was settled recently. The bet, between New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz and Web 2.0 Founding Father Dave Winer, was about blogs topping the New York Times in Google search results for the top five news stories of 2007.
Rogers Cadenhead has done the tabulation and found that Winer, and blogging, have indeed won. Sort of, ReadWriteWeb notes.
According to the Associated Press, the top 5 news stories of 2007 were Chinese exports, oil prices, Iraq war, Mortgage crisis and the Virginia Tech killings. Obviously this is a list for US news markets and not the entire world.
Today, a Google search for those terms brings up a blog higher than the New York TImes for Chinese exports (Blogging Stocks 19th vs. NYT 20th), Iraq War (a blog was 17th, NYT 20th) and Virginia Tech killings (Newsvine coverage of the AP's top stories of the year is 9th in Google vs. the Times at number 30.) So blogs topped the Times in 3 out of 5 top stories.
Wikipedia, however, ranks higher than both blogs and wikis according to Candenhead.
The three blogs that topped the Times in the Google results in question don't tell such a simple story. Two are stories from the AOL-owned Blogging Stocks and one is from social news site Newsvine, now owned by MSNBC.
