Popularity Trends

Technorati the blog aggregator has a feature that lets you see how many times a specific word gets used everyday in the blogs it follows.

Unlike Google's Zeitgeist which compiles what people are searching for, Technorati's search tells you what people (or at least blogs) are talking about.

It also doesn't suffer from Google's signal to noise problem: for instance Jay-Z or Eminem will always get more searches on Google than some hot indie band. So you can see the Pitchfork Effect at work.

A coupla weeks ago when I thought the Decemberists were getting overexposed in the blogs, I wasn't imagining.



There was a definite upswing in early November.

Here's the mentions for "Lukas Rossi" over the last 6 months:



You can see a definite weekly cycle leading up to the Supernova finale, but he's basically fallen off the radar since.

Reading some blogs recently, I came across a word which was popular for a while, but I hadn't seen in a while - Schadenfreude :



... and boom!, there was in fact a sudden spike. What could that be ? I looked for some correlations :



... ahhh, or how about ...



Hah ha!