May 20, 2008
Trendspotting
I was having a little play with Google Trends last night, trying to pick out terms that were relevant to education at scale, and not surprisingly, trend data suggests that there's probably a big online seasonal market for revision products...
As I was messing around, it struck me that a "trendspotting" shared content site might be quite interesting, where users can submit sets of terms (like aqa, revision, bitesize) that appear to be correlated on Google Trends? (AQA is an examining body, and bitesize is a BBC revision site.)
The closest I found was something similar for blogs - Trendpedia, (and I've also posted about mood trends before). Microsoft also have a trend forecast tool - Search Volume Seasonality Forecast.
You could even imagine using this as the basis for a game with a purpose, (that is, as a gwap;-). For example, I'm paired with another player, and we have to find sets of at least three separate words with a high trend correlation.
Higher "difficulty levels" of the game could require paired players to find terms that leads or lag each other in terms of trends. For example, in the UK, we get the following...
Other levels might include finding terms with different sorts of periodicity.
(Note that this game would also work as a solo player game because the 'scoring' feedback comes from measuring the correlation of trend data, rather than agreement with other players; but maybe the discovery process would be aided by woring with someone else in a social way?)
Anyone out there interested in getting together to set some sort of "trend associations" site up? I figured something like this, maybe: http://trendspotting.corank.com/? (I'll work on it as and when I can... let me know if you want to help pull the site together ;-)
Tags: trendspotter, gwap
Posted by ajh59 at May 20, 2008 11:25 AM