-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 8 a.m.)
No. 1: "facebook lite." Wait, Facebook is actually taking features away!? After years of adding tabs, apps, and polls, Facebook has started beta testing a new "lite" version that trades Mob Wars and Superwalls for a stripped-down, quick-loading interface. Some are speculating that Facebook is making a move on Twitter; Techcrunch insists Facebook Lite is meant mainly to make the site faster for users without a broadband Internet connection. Currently, the beta test is only available to a small number of users in India.
No. 8: "perseid meteor shower." The sky is falling, and it should be spectacular. Tonight is the peak of the annual Perseid meteor showers, when 60 to 80 visible meteors per hour will shoot out of the Perseus constellation (for those able to get away from bright city lights, at least). According to NASA, the best time to catch the showers will be from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m., when glare from the moon is low. Look to the Northeast.
No. 64: "Wallace Souza." Imagine if Unsolved Mysteries host Robert Stack had gone around kidnapping young women and shining weird lights in people's eyes from southwestern mountaintops. This is essentially the charge against Brazilian TV host and legislator Wallace Souza, who has been accused of commissioning at least five murders in order to cover them on his popular true crime show."To say that a program that has had a huge audience for so many years had to resort to killing people to increase this audience is absolutely absurd," Souza told the AP.
Photo of meteor shower courtesy of Flickr user Retro Traveler.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 15: "xbox live down" and No. 57: "cyxymu." Gamers are seeking out Google to find out why they couldn't get their Xbox Live fix yesterday. The social media blog Mashable reported that the site was down for an hour and lamented that "gaming was once again a solitary experience." It's likely the glitch was part of a larger Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that also affected the social networking sites Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal. Russian patriots attempting to silence Cyxymu—a Georgian blogger who was critical of last year's war between Russia and Georgia—were behind the attack, according to the Guardian.
No. 32: "Alison Byrne Fields." John Hughes fan Alison Byrne Fields revealed on her blog yesterday that the recently deceased famous director was her pen pal for two years while she was in high school. He consoled her when her English teacher gave her bad grades, telling her to write to "please herself" and confessed that he wrote to her more than any living member of his family. In one letter, he admitted: "Truly, hope all is well with you and high school isn't as painful as I portray it."
No. 81: "Chelsea Clinton." What's it gonna be, Chelsea, yes or no? On Thursday, when a Kenyan man offered 40 goats and 20 cows for the former first daughter's hand in marriage, Hillary didn't reply with a firm "no." "My daughter is her own person, very independent, so I will convey this very kind offer," she told Fareed Zakaria of CNN. This comes after the Clintons denied rumors in early May that Chelsea would marry boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky in the town of Chilmark, Mass., on Martha's Vineyard this summer. (Yes, the same town that the Obamas will retire to at the end of August.)
Photograph of Chelsea Clinton courtesy of Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images.
-
sponsorship
When word of Michael Jackson's death first spread, Google News went on the defensive. CNET is reporting that Google initially interpreted the tremendous spike in Jackson queries on Thursday as evidence of nefarious web sabotage and, in response, did the search-engine equivalent of sticking one's fingers in one's ears and singing "la-la-la" (or "ma-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa"): Many users who searched for Jackson news around 3 p.m. received an error message that read, "We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
Slate's Jody Rosen is among those who have remarked that, with Jackson's death, the "monoculture," long on the wane, enjoyed one (final?) astounding spasm: For a few days, everyone was talking about, reading about, and listening to one man. The Google News story—along with stats demonstrating that Jackson drew in Yahoo's biggest single-day audience ever (16.4 million unique visitors, surpassing the previous record of 15.1 million set on election day, 2008) and dwarfed Iran and swine-flu posts on Twitter—raises a related question about what happens when the supposed agents of the monoculture's fragmentation—Google searches, Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, MP3 blogs, etc.—all collude to resuscitate it. With the possible exception of Obama's win, Jackson's death is the most significant culturequake of the 2.0 era (which missed 9/11, Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the O.J. chase). And so it's not just that, for a spell, everyone was talking about the same thing again. Isn't it also the case that more people were talking about the same thing than was ever possible before?
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?