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“Ozymandias” poem done as video-game movie!
Google’s now-annual ranking of the Zeitgeist is out! For those of you who haven’t seen this yet, it’s Google’s redaction of the year’s most popular search terms. As usual, I find the whole thing fascinating: Which men, women, news events, games, TV shows, and memes dominated the English-speaking, Net-using world? Search engines have become the evolving rorschach blots of the age; hell, I wish I could view a real-time scrollbar of Google’s top searches on a daily basis.
Here’s the trend I find most interesting in this year’s Zeitgeist: Trillian hit number 13 on the “Top 20 Gaining Queries” — queries that grew the most this year. Trillian is, of course, the instant-messaging killer app: It lets you connect to ICQ, AOL IM, MS Messenger and Yahoo Messenger (as well as IRC, for all you l33t d00dz) all at once. It’s a great indicator of how messaging is becoming the de facto way people keep in contact — by pinging each other all day long, instead of composing back-and-forth emails.
It probably also foregrounds how important the “presence” aspect of instant messaging is becoming: The ability to know which of your posse is online, at any point in time. I use my Danger Hiptop a lot for that reason. When I’m on the road and want to know where everyone is, I zip for a second onto AOL IM and see who’s online; it gives me this nigh-ESP-like sense of my location in the datasphere.
Interestingly, “SMS” was the second-most popular “technology” search (after “MP3”, of course). Another excellent example of how messaging — via mobile devices — is finally hitting the mainstream in the U.S., after winning over the entire European continent. If everybody out there hasn’t already read Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs, run — do not walk — to get a copy and read it now. It’s breathtakingly prescient about where communications, and our social behavior, are going.
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
New technique renders objects at sea “invisible” to waves of water
Poll: Young people who use landlines are more conservative than those who use mobile phones
At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts
North Dakota the most outgoing state, according to study of “the geography of personality”
» visit the Collision Detection archives
September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM
From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:
One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?
Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.
September 25, 2008 » 11:21 AM
“Video from a camp north of Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby, snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter pastime of young Canadian motorists.” - A key piece of evidence submitted in the trial of a gang of alleged young Canadian terrorists.
September 24, 2008 » 11:21 PM
“Life imitates art imitating life: just thought a gnat crawling across my monitor was part of a Flash-based ad. I clicked it.” - A Tweet from Bill Braine.
September 24, 2008 » 02:37 PM
“Funniest FB friend request ever: “Twitter friend hoping to get to second base (Facebook!) ;-).”” - A recent Tweet by Pistachio
September 24, 2008 » 12:28 PM
Chinese powdered-milk crisis creates a new market: The return of the wet nurse
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