the buzz log
Conversation Starters...or Dividers
The Christmas music may already be playing, but Thanksgiving elbows its way in with an air of gratitude and family warmth.
Ah, but now that the presidential elections are over and some people are feeling too economically fragile to shop, what's left to do? Yes, there's always football (playing flag or watching the boob tube)...but what's left to talk about over the stuffed turkey and quivering dish of ambrosia?
Lucky for you, eternal battles are always waged in Search—you know, could Mortal Kombat character Baraka beat Batman, or is the high-definition field rate of 1080p really that much better than 1080i video quality.
In other words, 'versus' comparisons continue in high gear this past week. People are checking out the face-offs in sports, music, technology and games. "Zune vs. ipod" (+44%) smacks of holiday gift-giving implications, while "affect vs. effect" (+31%) signifies age-old language struggles. (FYI, think of the "a" in affect as action verb, while effect is usually employed a noun. Hope this helps a little.)
And nothing induces a rousing discussion better than taking sides in a match-up, no? So, peruse the categories below to choose your conversational gambit. (Sure, some of these contests—like the UFC fight—are already resolved...but one can always throw in what-ifs and next-times.)
If you have your own 'versus' scenario you want entertained, throw it in the comments below and see what comes up. Just remember to play nice.
Fastest Moving "Versus" Searches
Sports
- Alabama vs. Auburn, football (off the charts)
- Mexico vs. Honduras, soccer (+604%)
- Texas Tech vs. Oklahoma, football (+471%)
- Manny Pacquiao vs. De La Hoya, boxing (+35%)
- Brock Lesnar vs. Randy Couture video, mixed martial arts (+471%)
Tech
- 1080i vs. 1080p (+206%)
- Blackberry Storm vs. iPhone (+123%)
- Plasma vs. LCD (+73%)
- Zune vs. iPod (+44%)
- PS3 vs. XBox 360 (+26%)
Gaming
- Bleach vs. Naruto Game (+295%)
- Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe (+73%)
- WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 (+17%)
- WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 (+13%)
- Marvel vs. Capcom (+2%)
Entertainment
- Naruto vs. Orochimaru, anime, (off the charts)
- Undertaker vs. Big Show , WWE entertainers (off the charts)
- Ti vs. T.I.P., music (+237%)
- Freddy vs. Jason 2, movies (+74%)
- Alien vs. Predator 2, movies (+22%)
Filed under: Sports, Tech, Holidays, Entertainment, Games
Watching the Watchdogs
Newsmakers and newsbreakers, beware: The media watchdogs are getting savvier ... and funnier.
The 2008 election fracas has proven so far to be a banner year for women, minorities, news junkies, political websites, "Saturday Night Live," and comedians poking fun at the entire process. In fact, if Wall Street had decided to buy stock in Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, America might not be in this economic mess.
CNN and Comedy Central are finally cashing in on the electorate's inclination to laugh at others, including the media itself. "D.L. Hughley Breaks the News" puts one of the original kings of comedy on the Cable News Network Saturday nights. News about the "News" got anticipatory searches pumping for Hughley, boosting his online profile into our top 60,000 search terms. In a TV Guide Q&A, Hughley calls it a different sort of late-night talk show with less celebs and more interesting real folk like the sheriff who refused to evict people from foreclosed homes. He also points out that he'll be CNN's first intentional comedian. (Sorry, Wolf Blitzer, you had your chance.)
His Oct. 25 premiere lags just 10 days behind David Alan Grier, one of the original "In Living Color" kings who wasn't a Wayan brother. The presidential Democratic nomination of Barack Obama spurred Comedy Central to move up the news satire "Chocolate News" from its originally scheduled 2009 debut to October 15. Grier's slant—which the Hollywood Reporter lauds as "TV's first black-supremacist parody"—is less concerned with real news than its comic essence and spoofing media, like a bit on biracial Siamese twins. Searches from the day of its premiere pushed Grier's buzz past Stewart or Colbert, and his show's buzz higher than "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report."
While Hughley and Grier latch onto the funnybone, armchair watchdogs may soon be able to literally highlight media bias on their own: The New York Times profiled SpinSpotter's plug-in, which allows readers to insert red flags into an online article's objectional passages and explain why in a pop-up box.
Many kinks still need to be worked out, but the Seattle company hopes to make money by selling the service ... to reporters, politicians and public relations. On second thought, someone put a watchdog on the watchdog.
Mr. Jobs, Google's On Line One
Oh my. Oh my, oh my, oh my. Apple's iPhone finally has some serious competition. Google, a company that knows a thing or two about technology, is teaming with T-Mobile to deliver the highly anticipated "G-Phone" next month.
This is huge, and the blogosphere knows it. Not only did searches for "g-phone," "google phone," and "google phone price" skyrocket, a zillion speculative articles hit the Buzz faster than you can say "I'm feeling lucky."
Mashable writes that while the G1 phone isn't pretty, "the software and strategy shows enormous vision." TrendHunter features a slew of "leaked" photos of the phone. Gearlog explains what folks mean when they call the doohickey an "android phone" and the Silicon Alley Insider breaks down just how amazon.com figures into all this. And, finally, for all those wondering what it costs—multiple sources report that the precious, precious communication device will run you $179 (plus a two year contract with T-Mobile).
And what of T-Mobile? Nobody seems too excited that the Discover Card of cell phone carriers has exclusive rights to the gizmo. Searches on the T-Mobile hardly moved. Still, you can expect that to change dramatically as the phone's October 22 release date draws closer.
Missile Envy
Why spend billions on turbofans, alloys, and other missile parts when Adobe Photoshop costs around $650?
Then again, perhaps the Iranian Revolutionary Guard doctored an image of Iran's missile tests because three missiles just didn't present the pleasing symmetry that four would.
News organizations around the world picked up the photo of Iran flexing its missile muscle, including Yahoo! News, the Financial Times, and the Los Angeles Times. According to NPR, however, the Web site Little Green Footballs and the New York Times both noticed something was awry. It turned out the fourth airborne missile was a fake: As an NYT photography editor told USA Today, it had been "cloned, and rather sloppily."
Huffington Post blogger Harry Shearer (a.k.a. Mr. Montgomery Burns and other Simpsons characters) went even further to say the photo could be a rerun from two years back. U.S. military intelligence hasn't confirmed that, although they told CNN that Iran fired only one missile on day two rather than a round. (The alleged photo was taken on the first day.)
To be fair, the image wasn't completely misleading, merely... hopeful. There had been four missiles, but one misfired. Would that fact have eased jitters, which in turn stoked up oil prices and likely contributed to the Dow's freefall on Friday? Does the fakery both lessen the European Union's worry about Gulf tensions, or give even more weight to Russia's statement that the U.S. doesn't need missile defenses in Eastern Europe?
Iran might not be the only country with performance issues. The Union of Concerned Scientists say the U.S. missile defense isn't all that either. Whether that'll stop all the tough talk remains to be seen... if we can believe our eyes.
Filed under: Tech, Photography, Iran, Military, News
Battery-Operated Textbooks
Imagine a campus in which students carry only man-purses, instead of 80-pound packs stuffed with textbooks. Amazon may soon get additional academic credit as more university publishers sign up with its wireless reading device.
Kindle will start carrying titles from Princeton University Press this fall. According to Inside Higher Education, the prestigious outlet joins the presses published by Oxford, Yale, and University of California in going digital.
The textbook savings aren't going to be instant. Kindle, which hit the market in November and was instantly backordered for weeks, cut its $399 price a measly $40. With some titles only a few dollars cheaper than the paper version, textbook readers save mostly on shipping costs and time. Plus, Kindle is clearly in its infancy with a clunky interface and, as one otherwise enthusiastic blogger notes, few social networking elements.
Still, people have been buying the digital reader, and one analyst calls it the new iPod. Amazon originally targeted the male tech-toy buyers, but women are apparently the true audience. Females have been warming to Kindle and currently makes up half of the device's searches, which have been growing after a post-holiday lull. The Wall Street Journal opines the product could be a moneysaver overall, partly due to its free mobile Internet access and costs of regular titles. Then of course there's instant gratification: Owners could download a former White House press secretary's sold-out memoir on the fly.
No word on whether Amazon will "pull an Apple" and come out with a thinner, sexier version at half the cost, but the Philadelphia Inquirer suggests a 2.0 is in the works.
Filed under: Tech, Books, Reading, Electronics, School
top movers
| Rank | Subject | 1-Day Move |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ford 400 | Breakout! |
| 2 | Indonesia Ferry | Breakout! |
| 3 | Jordan Chandler | 3481% |
| 4 | Evan Chandler | 2322% |
| 5 | American Music Awards | 1841% |
| 6 | John F. Kennedy | 1529% |
| 7 | Turkey Stuffing Recipes | 1361% |
| 8 | Liam Hemsworth | 1172% |
| 9 | Lou Dobbs | 1142% |
| 10 | Hendrick Motorsports | 888% |
top leaders
| Rank | Subject | Move | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Black Friday | +340 | 1290 |
| 2 | NFL | +489 | 670 |
| 3 | Jennifer Lopez | +451 | 515 |
| 4 | New Moon | -67 | 250 |
| 5 | American Music Awards | +236 | 249 |
| 6 | UFC | -36 | 239 |
| 7 | Miley Cyrus | +66 | 169 |
| 8 | Hulu | -11 | 154 |
what's the buzz?
A subject's buzz score is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read. Weekly leaders are the subjects with the greatest average buzz score for a given week.
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