Sentinel.com blog

Our most popular story today is about Clay Butler’s medical marijuana product called Canna Cola, a soft drink that contains THC.

It’s a story about a local guy who doesn’t smoke pot, but has an interesting take on marketing this product. And the story has become a national phenomenon, featured on the home page of the Drudge Report, on Gawker, on the New York Post, and it’s been shared and liked and tweeted around the world.

Our reporter Wallace Baine said he talked to Butler and advised him not to answer the phone today, and maybe go surfing.

The attention is driving up traffic on our site. We average somewhere in the ballpark of 100,000 page views a day. We’re on a pace to hit about 160,000 today.

Our Sunday story on Clay Butler's medical marijuana soda product has been featured on the Drudge Report's home page.

An update. On Day 3, the story is more popular than ever. We’re receiving traffic from Drudge, Digg, Newsjunky.com, the Huffington Post and especially … mediatakeout.com, which has sent us more than 40,000 page views today. Thanks go to “The Most Visited Urban Website in the World”! Their headline: ‘There’s A New WEED SODA . . . That Gets You HIGH!!!’

The most popular story on the Sentinel website today is a short police brief that we published last week.

To summarize, guy goes into a Watsonville bank, claiming to have a bomb and interested in robbing the place for enough money to pay a friend’s rent. Staff suggests he’d be way better off filling out loan paperwork, which he does, and then he gets arrested.

But this is a story people are now viewing and talking about across the country, and beyond. We’re getting traffic from Gawker, Boingboing, and we’ve had thousands of views from the Spanish language site meneame.net. It’s been shared on Facebook more than 500 times, it’s starting to climb in popularity on reddit.com, and we may be just getting warmed up. It’s even building some traffic on guyism.com.

Feel free to share the story with your friends before they share it with you. We may have an update to the story.

Update – Keith Olbermann named Smith one of the “Worst People in the World.”

The story has also been receive attention today from Gizmodo and nu.nl.