Monday, August 13, 2007

Top 10 Trends - August 12, 2007

1. lisa lampanelli - Lisa Lampanelli, the comedian most known as being an insult comic, seems to be popular most recently because of her appearance on the Roast of Flavor Flav on Comedy Central. You can find a small clip of her performance here.





2. anna farris - Anna Farris has recently been made popular because of the upcoming movie she will be starring in titled House Bunny. More information here.





3. merv griffin - Merv Griffin became a popular search on Google after his death on Sunday, at the age of 82. Merv was known for being the creator of a few famous game shows such as Jeopardy and Wheel Of Fortune. You can find more on the story here.





4. meteor shower august 12 2007 - Many things lately related to meteor showers have been popular lately because of the Perseid Meteor Shower that has been viewable at night. The meteor shower peaked at 3:30 AM EST on the 12th. Read more here.





5. monowi nebraska - Monowi, Nebraska is a town in Nebraska with a population of 1. The only resident acts as the Mayor, Police Chief, Town Clerk, Bartender and Librarian. I'm not sure what spiked interest in the small town so recently, but it happens to be ranked 5th on Google Trends for the 12th. Here is the article.





6. roast of flavor flav - Related to Lisa Lampanelli, the Roast of Flavor Flav has become popular because of the recent hype about it on Comedy Central.





7. carrot top - Once again related to the whole Roast of Flavor Flav event, Carrot Top will also appear on the roast.





8. tiger woods wife - Elin Nordegren became popular in the Google search field after her appearance at the US PGA Masters, where she was supporting her husband - Tiger Woods. Tiger won the tournament by two strokes. More information here.





9. woody austin - Woody Austin also became popular because of the US PGA Masters, where he placed 2nd behind Tiger Woods.





10. tommy thompson - Tommy Thompson became popular in searches after dropping out of the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. He pledged to drop out of the race if he didn't place 1st or 2nd in the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa, and did so after placing 6th.

Vacation, Catch Up, and New Projects

First off, sorry for the lack of content lately. I have just returned from a 2 week vacation in Europe with the family. The good news, is that during the course of the vacation I have thought of a few new ideas to implement on this blog.



If you have taken a look at the recent posts/comments, you may have
noticed that my most recent project - the top 10 Digg application - has
come to a quick stop. The reason for this is that Digg released a
widget during the project. At first, I had a chance to continue the
project because the widget did not have the capability to display the
top 10 Digg submissions from the front page of Digg. Soon after I
mentioned this, a comment was left from Kurt W. of Digg saying that this
was a bug and would soon be fixed. Fine.. next project.



The next project actually consists of two parts. The first will be the
next coding project, and the second will be more of a blog project. The
coding project is going to involve the top 10 songs from the Billboards
top 100. I will most likely write up a little regex that will
parse the HTML of the Billboards website, and return the top 10 songs in
a usable format.



The second part of the project involves Google Trends. If you haven't seen the website before, Google Trends has a list of the top 100 searched terms on Google for each day. I am going to start explaining to the readers of this blog, why each of the search terms in the top 10 is so popular. Some of them may be obvious, but others may bring new light to a subject that could be useful. For you blog writers out there, this could be a great resource for finding hot topics to write about.