Philippa Thomas, a BBC reporter on sabbatical who blogged Crowley's comment on Manning's detention, provides a timeline:
I could see the sources for the thousands of readers coming to my blog. They began coming purely via social media tools Reddit and Twitter. Then via the websites of big media brand names primarily the BBC and the Guardian. Hundreds at a time came from new media outposts like the Huffington Post, Salon and The Daily Kos. I knew that a lot of Washington insiders were across it when readers began clicking through from politico.com and washingtonpost.com .