What Are People Looking For?

I was poking through Google's toolset and stumbled on Google Trends. Google says that their Trends (in beta) can let you "see what the world is searching for." Among the cool features, you can compare trends on different search terms over time and by region.

So, you can see that U.S. users had a spike in searches for Amy Winehouse, and that Amy tracks higher than Britney. Across the pond, Brits were generally less interested in learning about Amy, and more in Britney.

You can also track the relative popularity of Kanye West and 50 Cent. Fitty famously promised to retire from music if Kanye's CD outsold his on the day they were both released. 50 had more searches than Kanye through most of 2007--until the release of the CDs. Kanye queries killed him on that day, and has been a bit ahead ever since.

So, what about the Democratic contenders?

Well, Hillary Clinton (red line above) was ahead of Barack Obama (blue line) during the long pre-primary season. Interest in both candidates picked up at the end of December, going into the Iowa caucuses. Since then, people have been looking for information about Obama more than info about Clinton--and on some days by much more.

Even more interesting (at least to me) is the regional trending.

By December 2007, Obama (blue) was ahead of Clinton in Iowa, which he won. Clinton (red) was more interesting to people in New Hampshire, and she won there. And South Carolina queries at the end of the year were pretty even for our intrepid candidates. [Obama ended up winning S.C. handily at the end of January.]

Anybody picking up a trend here? It looks like people might be looking for stuff that they are interested in. This can be troubling for the Clinton campaign if you take a look at what people are looking for now in Texas and Ohio.

The Google Trend for the past 30 days sees a large gap between searches for Obama (still the Blue Line) and Clinton (Red Line) in these two key upcoming primary states. Tuesday will tell, but as far as people looking for candidate information, it appears that they are more likely to be seeking information about Obama. Or maybe how to contribute to his campaign. Or how to volunteer. Or who knows. Maybe they already know enough about Clinton.

This Google Trends stuff is so cool. And despite the fact it skews to Internet users--more educated, more white, more wealthy-- it's now the Doc's zeitgeist poll.

Deep Cuts

NYT threw me back in time to my second job ever. At Music Stop.

We were the discount record store. Not quite as hip and not as big a catalog as Peaches--but we had the top selling LPs at the best prices. And I was introduced to music beyond Foreigner, Kansas, Led Zepplin, and Foghat.

I did the weekly inventory--mostly because I worked on Mondays, was able to work the order book, and really liked flipping through the bins and bins of records and seeing which records were missing from last week. Why didn't anyone buy those Robert Palmer records? The album art looked promising. Why did the white jazz artists get filed under ROCK and the black jazz artists under R&B? And wow! did that Cars record take off.

What I learned was that sometimes the whole was greater than a sum of it's parts. The concept album--from Beatles to Pink Floyd to OutKast--told a story, ran a gamut of feelings, said more about the artist, more about me.

I must say that I love ITunes, and I loved Napster in the old days.

I also love a great pop single. But buying the album--or CD using current terms--gives a bigger view of the artist. If you heard the chart topping Lose Control from Missy Elliot's Cookbook but missed the marching band at the end of We Run This, you really missed. Yes, I'm sorry I bought the weak Dangerously in Love for the best single of that summer, but delighted to have all of Late Registration (Sorry Mr. West is gone).

Now record stores are gone, and artists are being signed for deals on singles--not LPs. I am not smart enough to know what the market will do, but I do miss the bins, and the album art, and getting a paper cut when you slit the record for the first time.

We were at Kemp Mill records a few years back, and I tried to impress the boys with my coolness.

ME: You know I used to work in a record store.
The 15-year-old (at age 9): What's a record?