Pope watch

Rogers Cadenhead is sharp guy. Why? Because he bought the domain name benedictxvi.com. Before you accuse him of being a cybersquatter you should know that he bought the name at least 24 hours BEFORE the new pope was elected! He also registered the names:

• ClementXV.com
• InnocentXIV.com
• LeoXIV.com
• PaulVII.com
• PiusXIII.com

Meanwhile my amateur media analysis conducted via television, radio and internet simultaneously (it was my day off what did you want me to do?) revealed that skynews.com, unsurprisingly, and news.bbc.com, surprisingly, were the first outlets to post the election of the new pope on their websites. cnn.com was still focusing on the Oklahoma memorial for at least 2 minutes after the SKY and BBC had reported on their websites. Reuters and AP, although were the first to report that a new pope was elected through their newswire, while the rest of us were trying to figure out whether the grey smoke we were seeing was white or black, did not bother updating their website for as long as I was looking, about 10 minutes. But they did hit my RSSBandit fastest together with the Guardian which was the one website I forgot to check.

In the time between the white smoke and our first sighting of the new pope BBC had the best coverage. This was because all the other stations had pope experts who had finally ran out of things to say after repeating themselves for the last week. The BBC, probably too broke to afford a group of experts, went into the crowd instead, interviewing nuns, priests, chain smoking Italians, and the gathered faithful.

Strangely enough the guys that had all the right connections, the ones who had people on the inside i.e. vatican.va were the last guys to report anything. And when they did it was, very helpful to the waiting surfing masses, in Italian.
I sat there waiting to see the coat of arms change but nada. For those of you who don’t know, (or those of you who have a life) when there is no pope the Vatican use a modified coat of arms to signify a Vacancy in the Holy See. It looks like this:

After the new pope is elected they change the coat of arms back to its original with hat, bells, keys and everything which looks like this:

As for the new head honcho himself, some Kenyans love him, others don’t like him that much.

And that concludes Pope Watch 2005.