I don’t really know what to make of this, but I occasionally trawl Google Search Trends/Insights to see what people are looking for, and whether they’re changing much over the past few years. This seems to me to be as good an indicator of things as anything else. I did it back in 2005 with … Read more
Thought I’d offer a brief history of the financial crisis as seen through Google Insights, which measures the popularity of a search term over time. Interest in the word subprime spiked a couple of times in 2007 (above) before we figured out it was all about toxic debts (below): and credit crunches: Then we realised … Read more
I use Google Insights quite a bit—I find it a very useful way to measure interest in topics. Here’s one I keyed in just for the hell of it. Red is the word success and blue is the word fail. The chart covers from 2004 to today: What seems to have happened is a surge … Read more
(cross-posted from a Loose Wire sister site, ConvergedMedia.net) CNN.com has a good way of informing readers of the ‘freshness’ of news by adding notes in red to indicate when the story was added or updated. (In the example above it also adds a ‘developing story’ label.) This kind of thing is helpful in that the … Read more
If you’re looking for the future of news, a pretty good example of it is at UK startup silobreaker, which isn’t a farm demolition service but a pretty cool news aggregation and visualization site. In other words, it lets you look at news in different ways. And it’s caught the attention of Microsoft, who today … Read more