MarkWhittaker.com

I “binged” myself on Thursday. No, I didn’t injure myself in the process.

Instead of “googling” Mark Whittaker, I searched “Mark Whittaker Pittsburgh” on MSN’s new search engine, Bing. Why? My handy Google Analytics gives me all kinds of cool info about visitors to this site, including the referring search engine and the search terms used. Someone “binged” me this week, so I figured I’d “bing” myself to see what popped up.

The link to this site was at the top of the list, and my still-visited post about Mark Whitaker of NBC News also is near the top. No surprises. But on the second page of results, there was a link to Twitterholic, which ranks Twitter users by the number of followers they have. What fun!

It turns out that my 21 Twitter followers place me at number 874,847 among all Twitter users. Best of all, I’m ranked in the top 600 in Pittsburgh at number 487. Heck, I feel privileged.

Ashton Kutcher reigns supreme with the most Twitter followers. There are almost 2.9 million of ‘em (and I’m not among them). Ellen DeGeneres is second with almost 2.6 million followers.

So who’s got the top spot in Pittsburgh? Her name is Susan Smith, and she runs a blog called Together We Flourish. The blog helps non-profit organizations get the word out about their various activities. Susan and her blog have 4,240 followers, according to Twitterholic. Cool, huh?

In second place is a 22-year-old Pittsburgh musician, T.J. Cornwall. I spent a little time listening to T.J.’s tunes on his MySpace page. The kid’s got some talent (and thus my contribution to your serendipity today, dear reader).

I’ve moved from Bing to Pittsburgh’s top Twitterers (Tweeters?) in just seven paragraphs. Isn’t that enough reason to follow my Tweets? If you do, I promise I’ll write more often!

Just to help anybody who may have Googled me by mistake, here’s the Washington Post short about the appointment of Mark Whitaker to replace Tim Russert as chief of the NBC News Washington bureau.

I’ve been aware of Mark’s career for a long time. He’s just a year younger than me, and we both started our journalism careers at the same time. I used to see his name listed in Newsweek as a researcher. Of course, he eventually became editor of that great magazine. I’ve been on different part of the news industry spectrum (notice I didn’t say lower!).

As to the number of T’s in our names, I’m told that in my family history there was a family split sometime, and one family member added a second T to separate himself from the rest of the family.

There’s another famous Mark Whitacre. He was the president of the Archer Daniels Midland BioProducts Division who, as an FBI informant, blew the whistle on a price-fixing scheme. He was a key witness in an anti-trust case, although he pleaded guilty to fraud and spent eight years in a federal prison.