Julian assanges

Last year, Yahoo! celebrated ten years of sharing its annual Year In Review feature, marking the occasion by releasing 30 categories of the most popular searches on Yahoo! in 2011, one of the biggest lists up to that point in time. For 2012, Yahoo! one-upped themselves by providing us with the top 10 most popular searches in over 50 categories, giving us a mega list of the most common queries and questions asked by Yahoo! searchers over the last year. Vera Chan,Yahoo! senior editor and Web trend analyst, has possibly the 2nd best job at Yahoo! next to Marissa Mayer, as she has been involved with putting this annual feature together since 2005; she clearly enjoys looking for the "why" behind some of these popular search trends. Every year, Ms. Chan hosts a press conference call to share insights and give some context around these searcher behaviors, as she explains that we now live in a "Freakonomics" world - and people like Nate Silver are bringing new meaning to number crunching - … [Read more...] about Over 500 Top Searches In Over 50 Categories

Another year is almost over. The Christmas Number 1 song has been decided (in the UK at least); the web has proved that even after a brutal recession, people still need to shop; and, after a year in which Facebook & Twitter became (if they weren’t already) true phenomenons, we had the interesting experience of watching political leaks going social. Watergate 2.0 if you like. So what did we learn from the spread of social in 2010? What does any of this mean for the wider web, and world, and what does it herald for 2011? Well, my predictions have often been proved wrong, but where’s the fun in not even trying? 1. Facebook to hit the 1 billion mark I’ve explained the thinking behind this projection before (basically I’ve mapped the numbers in Excel, and we know Excel never lies), and as time goes on, I think it’s only getting more likely. Holland is now the only developed/Western nation holding out against Facebook dominance and the surge in uptake of … [Read more...] about 5 Social Marketing Predictions For 2011

Last weekend, rather than read stories about the US diplomatic cables that Wikileaks has released, I decided to read them directly myself. In doing so, I better understood why no one — certainly not the US State Department — is going to shove those cables back into the darkness. Finding Wikileaks My first step was to go to the Wikileaks site — which meant, as it does for many people, doing a Google search to find it. I discovered that Google wasn’t listing the site in its new location. Bing was, so I found it that way. The story below goes into more depth about that mess (Today, for me, Google STILL lists the non-functional Wikileaks.org site tops): The story also explains that while finding the main Wikileaks site might be tough, it exists in many different locations. Cables, Meet Distributed Torrents When I arrived, there was no way to actually browse the cables. (NOTE: There IS a way to browse them, as has been pointed out to me in the comments below. … [Read more...] about Why Wikileaks Will Never Be Closed Or Blocked