Trends, trends

For the past few years I’ve kept myself up to date by reading the NYT and listening to NPR (per usual). Lately I’ve been getting a little more creative. When I was in college I had my first real realization that I was living in a bubble; unaware of the world's news. I was only a few weeks into school and without watching TV or reading the papers I had no idea that hurricane Katrina had hit or anything about it. At that point I decided to make NYT my home page and to keep an eye out for big news I should know about.

Recently I was upset when I realized that none of the American papers were covering the election in Afghanistan and no one really knew about it at all. I’m still scared that something big will happen somewhere and we as a people won’t know about it. My solution: the wisdom of crowds. I read the book by James Surowiecki a few years ago and I use the logic in my personal life often. When I found out about google lab’s “trends” site I was all about it. The site compiles the most frequently searched terms and trends. It also has a forecast about flu trends for different geographic areas based on web searches (though I find with the swine flu thing, it’s a little off for 2009). I take a look at google trends a few times a day to see what people are looking at, so far I think I’ve learned about a lot of cool things that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.


P.S. I also wanted to note that google trends seems to be about 2 days faster at publicising a story before the NYT. For instance, I read about the experiments in Guatemala earlier in the week and today there was an editorial about it in the NYT. Cool.