Only Google Trends Will Set You Free

I have, my friends, discovered a peephole into minds across the globe (and it's helped me procrastinate doing anything productive for the past hour or so). Oh, Google Trends! How have I lived without you?

Here's how it works: You enter the name of anything into the search bar, and it gives you a list of the top 10 cities or regions where people are searching for the same thing, which is calculated relative to the total searches from that area. Google Trends also has graphs of the popularity of the search over time. For instance, here are the top 10 places where people are searching for "hot women" (I'm not kidding):

1. Yemen
2. Syria
   
3. Oman
   
4. Lebanon
5. Malta
6. Qatar
7. Kuwait
8. Saudi Arabia
9. Iran
10. Egypt
    

I've also learned:

• The United States comes in third in the frequency of searches for "Iraq War." Number one is, appropriately, Iraq. Second place goes to, um, Bangladesh.
• The U.S. also places third in another search: "wardrobe malfunction." Americans don't even come close on this one; India blows us out of the water with its interest in the so-long-ago Jackson/Timberlake/FCC fiasco.
  
• South Africans are a lot more interested in Focus on the Family founder James Dobson than Americans are.
  
• Americans are (duh) obsessed with Anna Nicole Smith, but we sadly fail in taking the gold in the category. The most obsessed? Pakistanis. Is your world crashing down yet?
  
• Paris and Nicole appeal to different cultures. Interest in Paris is very high south of the border, with Guatemala, Ecuador and Venezuela all making the top five (the U.S. doesn't crack the top 10), Whereas Nicole is the one on the minds of teenage boys in Australia, Sweden and New Zealand.
  

Google Trends also lets you compare the popularity of multiple terms at once, allowing you to create visually stunning graphs like this one:



Notice the only time when interest in Cheney soared past Lindsay was when he shot that guy in the face! What a country! Heck, what a world!

Rummy Bad Secretary! So Bad!

A headline from CNN.com:

Americans Know More About Science, But Will Pretty Much Believe Anything

The AP recently wrote about a new study that says Americans are more knowledgeable about science than they were 20 years ago, but more of them believe in aliens and astrology, too. The story ran in newspapers across the country, and many editors wrote their own headlines. But contradictory information can be difficult to convey in a headline. Here's how some outlets handled it:

USA Today: "U.S. has more science smarts, for the most part"

Hartford Courant (and others): U.S. has more science smarts, sort of"

Seattle Times: "Science knowledge increases, but..."

MSNBC: "Americans sending mixed signals on science"

Not bad, but here are some of my suggestions:

"U.S. is smarter about science, but still kinda dumb"

"Americans understand global warming, say E.T. is at fault"

"Americans' science smarts increases, due to dreams they had last night"

America Hearts Anna Nicole, Take II

A friend of mine has expressed his displeasure with my last post about Anna Nicole Smith. First, he doesn't like the picture I chose, saying it doesn't do justice to the star of his teenage fantasies. Secondly, he firmly believes Anna Nicole's story says something meaningful about our culture and he disagrees with some of what I wrote. Now, I agree that the story of Anna Nicole's life reveals something about our culture. I also believe our obsession with her death reveals something about our culture. But I don't believe these revelations have anything to do with why people cared about her in the first place. Millions of people have incredible life stories that reveal something meaningful about our culture, but they don't warrant nonstop news coverage. Part of Anna's cultural value can certainly be found in what she symbolized, but I would still argue she was not understood (by most) as symbolic. For most of us she was, as I said, boobs, money, sex and drugs.

America Hearts Anna Nicole

Coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death last week came in third place in its share of the news hole, according to the PEJ news coverage index. News outlets overall only devoted more time to Iraq policy and events. Oh, and the index considers the whole week, and Smith died Thursday, meaning it took only two days for her to almost catch up with Iraq.

The question of why we care about Smith has already been asked and answered by many: Marilyn, tragedy, rags-to-riches, blah blah blah. But, does any of that really ring true for anybody? I mean, come on, can't we just admit to why we really liked to hear about her? Drugs, boobs, money and sex. You don't have to be a diapered astronaut to understand the allure. But, as the story accompanying the PEJ index points out, the talking heads attempted to justify the double-D onslaught by trying to find "deeper meaning" in the stories of Smith and Lisa Nowak, an effort I find completely phony and pretentious. I can find deep meaning in my toenail clippings if need be, but why should I want to do that? We need to take these stories at face value and stop pretending that they say something about the American Dream. Nowak is a diaper-wearing, bat-shit crazy astronaut, for Christ's sake. Isn't that enough?

Finding Ourselves in Geektown

Inky Mountain was recently ordered to go forth and create an HTML table, which we don't know how to do. But we are very much in favor of learning - about HTML and about ourselves. So, we hopped over to the somewhat dorky site BlogThings.com, where taking a short quiz can answer important questions like which member of the Brady Bunch you would be or if you might be a sociopath. We already know we would totally be Bobby and while we may get cranky sometimes, we've never wanted to bump anyone off. So, we decided to take the quiz that would answer the most burning question of them all: What does it mean to be Inky? According to the test, Inky is:

I	Inspirational
N	Neat
K	Kind
Y	Young

Not bad, but "I" probably stands for "Idiot at HTML." That big blank space is not on purpose and we can't fix it. And we had added some really rad colors, too, but Blogger kept showing an error message. Alas, we are only geeks-in-training. UPDATED: Yeah! With some help, the white space is gone.

Watch It!

The PBS documentary-style program Frontline is airing "News War: Secrets, Sources and Spin" tonight, the first in a four-part series that will address issues in modern journalism. The show will discuss how some well-known journalists snuggle up close to members of the Bush administration, a sad fact made especially public through the Scooter Libby trial. Here's the synopsis:

In the first installment of a new, four-part special, "Frontline" examines the political and legal forces challenging the mainstream news media today and how the press has reacted in turn. Correspondent Lowell Bergman talks to the major players in the debates over the role of journalism in 2007, examining the relationship between the Bush administration and the press; the controversies surrounding the use of anonymous sources in reporting from Watergate to the present; and the unintended consequences of the Valerie Plame investigation-a confusing and at times ugly affair that ultimately damaged both reporters' reputations and the legal protections they thought they enjoyed under the First Amendment.

The program airs locally tonight at 9 p.m. on Rocky Mountain PBS, Channel 6 in Denver.

Editors Gone Wild

Is that a copy of In Touch magazine in my mailbox? If only. No, it's the new issue of Newsweek, starring Paris and Britney. Whew, we can rest easy for once! There's nothing of consequence happening in the world, and the time has come for Americans to struggle over this pressing question: "Are we raising a generation of 'prosti-tots'?"

A very serious question indeed. And for those jaded folks who think the story was just a cheap excuse to plaster the cover with boobs, don't be so quick to judge. The hard-hitting piece happens to be based on a startling new statistic: "A Newsweek poll found that 77 percent of Americans believe that Britney, Paris and Lindsay have too much influence on young girls." So you see, the magazine couldn't possibly uncover a statistic like that and not explore it.

And explore it they did. After mentioning their cover girls' lack of underwear as many times as possible, the authors vaguely muse about how much celebrity hoo-ha flashing affects third-grade girls. Their weighty conclusion? Not much:

Statistical evidence indicates that our girls are actually doing pretty well, in spite of Paris Hilton and those like her: teen pregnancy, drinking and drug use are all down, and there is no evidence that girls are having intercourse at a younger age. And in many ways it's a great time to be a girl: women are excelling in sports, academics and the job market.

Sigh. Read it if you must, but if you'd rather give yourself a thousand paper cuts than subject yourself to the idiocy, I'll help you out with my own edited version:

Some Americans think Britney's bad behavior negatively affects little girls, but that's not really true.

Super (Bowl) Meta-Marketing

It's Monday, and we all know who won the Super Bowl, but who won the ad war?

The Super Bowl, of course, is not really about football. Unless you're one of the relatively few Colts or Bears fans in Denver, watching the game was probably more about merrily drinking beer on a Sunday afternoon. And, of course, the commercials. I watched the game with a mishmash of football fans - Broncos, Cowboys, Patriots - all half-heartedly throwing their support behind one of the big teams. But their eyes were not exactly glued to the screen. Conversations paused briefly when a roar in the bar indicated a big play was in progress, but the chatting completely ceased during commercial breaks. Some of the ads had generated enough buzz beforehand that we were actually looking for them.

"Shhh. It's the K-Fed ad."

It's marketing magic. What other time do we want to watch commercials? "Please," we say to the huge corporations that can afford the $2.6 million price tag, "Sell me stuff. Entertain me with the antics of your silly frogs and horses!"

But for companies buying ad time, it's not enough to just tell the creative department to come up with something that will make 90 million tipsy people laugh. They can't just market their product in a commercial, they have to market the commercial itself. They have to market their marketing to their target market, get it? Some companies, such as Doritos and Chevrolet, held contests beforehand challenging students and other wannabes to create ads. Advertising Age criticized Super Bowl advertisers who failed to buy preferred search results from Google (Doing so would have ensured that Googlers looking for the Doritos ad online would have found in on Doritos' preferred site).

The game is over, but Super Bowl advertisers aren't resting just yet. The race is on to determine which ads will be quoted for the next year by America's frat boys and which ones were a waste of $2.6 million. As I write this, geeks all over the country are trying to make that call. Researchers at UCLA are actually performing brain scans to see which ads make viewers' brains light up. The verdict: Pizza rocks! Jessica Simpson, not so much. Over at YouTube, visitors can watch all the ads and vote on their rankings in what they've deemed the "SuperVote." The site has conveniently put 51 of 'em in one place so we can watch them again and again and again...Mmmm, Doritos...