Zombies vs. Politics - what are YOU blogging about?

First of all, if you haven't read it yet, check this article out - it's about the prevalence of zombie attacks and cocaine on currency found in blogs during August 2009: "In Social Media, Zombies And Cocaine Are The Hot Topics"

Thank you to Lo and Professor Macek for bringing this article to light. I think it has both some serious and interesting implications.

To start, a zombie uprising is fictional. It's the stuff of popular culture, of horror films and video games - not a legitimate scientific concern. It may be interesting to consider, but it's certainly not a topic worthy of receiving mainstream attention. I feel the claim that the zombine study mirrors real-world epidemics is just an excuse to defend the topic's undue popularity. If someone wanted to conduct a truly useful study on epidemics, he or she would use real data from actually existent epidemics and the scientifically documented characterstics of real contagious microorganisms. 

The topic of currency and cocaine is definitely more relevant to reality, but even then it seems to have received a bit more attention than necessary. However, I would much prefer this to be a hot topic than for zombie studies to be. Talking about fictional things is all well and good, but it's somewhat disturbing when it rises to such a high position of popularity while seriously important issues (health care policies, gun usage, political status of the Middle East) receive significantly less coverage from bloggers.

Seriously, which do you think is gonna happen first:
finding this guy in a dark alley, or the next presidential elections?

This leads to the question: What are bloggers really expected to cover? Are they supposed to tackle the same kinds of topics that the mainstream news outlets do, or are they allowed extra freedom to go off on wild tangents about zombie attacks? Does it depend on the kinds of topics being covered by the mainstream news and whether they warrant public discussion or not?

The thing that worries me is that these bloggers are spending considerable amounts of time writing about zombies when they could be shaping political opinion to improve the status of our country. They might be missing out on important political debates about the selection of our next president while they try to decide how they'll survive a fictional apocalypse. I think that kind of thing should, for the most part, be saved for the movies and video games. If bloggers want to dabble in the unreal now and then, that's perfectly fine, but if they let it consume their attention to the point where they ignore real-life issues, then we have a problem.