It occurred to me, after I read about the renewed volcanic activity of Mount Kathala in the Comoros and immediately had a look with Google Earth, that Google’s servers must notice surges in demand for specific geographic areas, and that these in turn would make great fodder for zeitgeist-like reports.
I wonder if usage patterns follow daylight, as awake people search locally. I wonder if league tables of the most popular places are stable, or fluctuate with the seasons. I wonder if sudden localized spikes in demand might not be useful as some kind of alert. And I would love to know what Chinese IP addresses search, or Argentine IPs, or Belgian IPs. In other words, I want my Google Earth Trends.
Very cool idea Stefan. I like it, and I also vote for Google Earth Trends! They should have a network link in Google Earth which uses one of those color coded, sizable circle plots indicating hot spots and size of interest in different regions. In other words, the GE Trends should be visualized in GE, not some static graph on a web page.
and how about an update of the area of interest with up-to-date overlays within a few hours/days… dreamin’ :-)
hmmm, I like it! I’ve probably got a mine of information as I have a number of view based network links that people often tend to leave open. Now if only had the time to analyse it!
Good info about Karthala, including a GE placemark, at this Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program page.
I like the trends idea too. I definitely see traffic surges to the GVP website triggered by new eruptions and also related to educational schedules.