Global web? Sounds like redundancy, but in fact many phenomena on the world wide web aren’t so global at all. Although non-western languages are of rising importance online, English still is the most spoken language on the web. And so it should be clear that Barack Obama’s election is mostly an American or perhaps Western […]
What is it that is really interesting for the Google population? The financial crisis? No, that’s what the media is interested in. People searching Google really are looking for cupcakes, sex toys and wizards. At least, that’s what Jonathan Stein found out when he compared the different search terms with Google Trends. In the meanwhile […]
A while ago, I compared the numbers for some of the big German websites and portals as measured by Google’s AdPlanner with the results published by the AGOF or Arbeitsgemeinschaft Online Forschung (Study Group Online Research). Now it’s been one month and I did a short comparison of last month’s Google numbers with this month’s. […]
Google’s new Insights for Search allows us to see what the world is looking for. A few months ago, I wrote a post for my German blog that described Google as a global database of people’s will to knowledge and of their wishes (this of course echoes John Batelle’s famous phrase). In that particular post […]
Every time I reread Marshall McLuhan, I am anew surprised how exact his forecasts from the 1960s were. Take for example the mind blowing “The Medium is the MASSAGE”, he published together with Quentin Fiore, a collage of short texts and images about the changing mediascape, which only had been fully materialized in the 21st […]
Lifestreaming and microblogging – both tend to overlap as most lifestream services allow for short status messages and most microblogs or activity streams allow feeding RSS feeds into them – are becoming more and more common in the social web. Some argue that Twitter is increasingly being challenged by other services like Friendfeed, Plurk or […]