See the Boston Marathon Bombing Hit the Blogs In Real-time

It's always said that everyone comes together during a disaster, and blogs are no different. Tragedies of a certain magnitude—and there have been too many of them lately; Sandy, Newtown, now Boston—demand that we drop what we are doing and opining about and turn our attention to the newly focused epicenter of the national dialog. For one thing, nothing else feels okay. Blogging about anything else suddenly feels trivial or inappropriate.

Today, we're writing about the Boston marathon bombing. As soon as news broke that dozens had been injured in a horrifying blast near the finish line of the marathon, blogs and aggregators across the spectrum—Gawker, the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed alike—instantly shifted focus to the tragedy.

Like a conversation silenced by the arrival of shocking news, the tenor of each blog's output changes on a dime. And that moment when it does is frozen, of course, on each feed that powers online publishing. Unlike in print, where a magazine cover or newspaper front page is restructured to fit a sudden tragedy like this, blogs and news sites still stack on the breaking horror on top of the regular old lists and roundups.

It's interesting to look at each of those last oblivious moments, because it reflects not just how online content production responds to calamity, but what all of us were discussing and sharing before we all started discussing and sharing loss and mourning. Here, for instance, is the moment the tragedy hit Buzzfeed:

Ice cream advertorials, TV teens, celeb news, Coachella fashion, unspeakable tragedy. Here's Gawker:

Snarkedy snark snark, sober disaster coverage. And Mashable's 'What's Hot' list:

We're telling inspiring social media stories, and telling stories about how we tell stories, and then one of them just sucks the air out of the room.

And here's Drudge, which throws the disaster coverage front and center, and leaves its political sniping intact below:

A tragedy as big as the Boston Marathon bombing soon becomes the 'Most Popular' thing to discuss; it quickly supersedes all the trivial topics of conversation. The moment when it does is preserved in blogroll amber, too, awkwardly nuzzling up against the certifiably inane fodder that previously occupied our conversation.

Here, for instance, is the Huffington Post, an hour after the disaster struck, alongside its conservative doppleganger, the Daily Caller, where the bombing jumped up the Most Popular slideshow list:

And, to be fair, here's Motherboard's:

And that, I suppose, is what we blog about before we blog about tragedy.