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The topic of "buzz" has been a favorite of mine for years. I currently use the following sites to track a small portion buzz on the Internet
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
http://buzz.yahoo.com/
Buzz. Trends. The term I’d prefer to use would be "Zeitgeist" or "Spirit of the time", but when see folks see/hear that word the expect you continue to speak in German… which I can’t
We will talk about this topic endlessly here because I firmly believe there are valuable ideas to be exploited around buzz, but for now, we wil ramble.
There is a problem with the list of three sites above. The problem is
that they are too broad. They are looking at data sets the size of "every
person
who looked at Google for a month" or "every person who went
to a movie last weekend".
What I’m interested in is three things. First, the beginning of trends. How in the world did Elmo get so popular? What were the three key decisions that someone made to assure the Elmo meltdown of the last millenium?
Second, non-mass-media trends. In the Elmo example, there was A LARGE CORPORATION which was working for years to do exactly what happened (ie: sell a bazillion Tickle Me Elmos). How about trends which start by some goofball in California deciding to sell rocks as pets? (Question to self: Pet rocks were actually a FAD… what’s the difference between a trend and a fad? Is there one?)
Lastly, what advantages does the Internet give someone to watch/learn about/see trends. The small list above is a pathetic example of primal tools which, while interesting, offer no competitive advantage to early trend identification and analysis. What micro-tools could be developed to identify buzz in it’s infancy? How would one get insanely weathly using these tools?
Next up: ‘Fucking Idiots’. We hate them, but they’re paying the bills, folks.
