Since the Mark Mangino investigation broke on KUSports.com on Tuesday, we’ve been monitoring the story’s progress across the Web. It’s definitely generating some pageviews for local news organizations – online content published about KU football is up 184% in comparison to the week before.

The graph below shows what categories this online content falls into. Social networks are a dominant force, providing 42.12% of the pie, but I’m interested in the amount of blogs vs. news organizations. Nearly just as many blogs have been written about the topic as news articles. Hmmmm…. let’s delve further.

http://worldonline.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/img/blogs/entry_img/2009/Nov/20/KansasFootball_SiteTypeBreakdown-2.jpg

When I checked to see which organizations had published the most content on the topic since Tuesday, this was the list:

Twitter (230)
KUSports/LJWorld (21)
KansasCity.com (12)
Kansan.com (11)
BleacherReport.com (6)
Deadspin.com (5)
Kansas.com (5)
ESPN.com (5)
FOX4KC.com (5)

Two major sports blogs (BleacherReport and Deadspin) sit comfortably in the top 10. Obviously bloggers would have a lot to say on this topic, but determining their influence over a national audience is trickier.

One of the systems we use to analyze online data has an influence ranking system. It factors in elements like page views (hits) and inbound links to the page itself to determine how important a single article or blog post is on any given topic – in this case, I used our KU Football data and applied a date filter from Tuesday through Thursday.

The most popular articles on the controversy thus far have been Jason Whitlock’s columns (Mangino is an abusive bully and Weight issues are root of Mangino’s problems), the Kansas City Star’s “nuts and bolts” article on the investigation and ESPN’s first article on the story (Internal review of Mangino underway).

What’s interesting is that the remainder of the top 10 most influential pages are blogs from Deadpsin, Bleacher Report and SportsByBrooks. That means 60 percent of the most influential content about the Mangino controversy (NOT including today) is on blogs.

So while these influential blogs make up a fraction of the volume, they’re dominating in influence.

Innnnnteresting.