Quick! What's the most popular thing on Google right now?
It literaly takes five seconds to figure that out. Just visit Google Trends, and you can see that the most popular topics are: fantasia on american idol and jill nicolin and mcdonalds free chicken. If you click on the individual links, Google supplies a series of blog posts and news articles that will help contextualize those surreal bits of web history.
This is crucial intelligence for most writers and journalists. You can blog about topics that everybody is thinking about, you can research what people were thinking about at a particular moment in time, and you can find boat-loads of new ideas for stories.
Bookninja just pointed us towards the L.A. Times, where the Web Scout blog turned that metric into a full-blown detective story--trying to figure out why a T.S. Eliot poem became the most popular search term for a few minutes in May. The writer sums it all up here, pointing at the mysterious new measure of popularity that can launch a thousand article:
"Whereas popularity lists on other sites, like YouTube, MySpace, or cnn.com—are occupied by site-specific stories or video clips that people have already looked at, Google’s most-searched is by definition a list of what people do not yet know enough about. And that gives rise to this strange new kind of popularity mystery, where even if somewhere, for some reason, something has caught on, it can be difficult to figure out why."
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