Data

• Watching football is a big waste of time. The average NFL game features only about 11 or 12 minutes of live gameplay content. The rest is replays, crowd shots, loitering, promos, and so on. But is this really a problem? When watching a game by myself, I can play with my daughter, read blogs, work (as I’m doing right now — Hi mom! — there’s 6:16 to go in Cowboys-Vikings!), etc. without really missing much, and lots of people Tivo games anyway. When watching games with friends, there’s plenty of breaks in the football we can use to discuss football. Who really loses in this arrangement? ELSEWHERE IN SPORTS: Calculating Charlie Brown’s Wins, Losses, and Other Pitching Stats based on one man’s Peanuts extrapolatin’. No, not this Charlie Brown.
• Regarding the strange and unreadable Esquire thing about Jay-Z… Oh man. Plenty of writers had problems with its content, while others focused on its baffling syntax. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I liked that “campefire flickers” line.) I’m not sure which part of this messy, messy article qualifies as a “Best” anything. It’s the most forced writing I’ve ever read — it reads like it was written by a suburban 15-year-old boy who always looks for chances to remind his teachers that Mos Def is poetry. Maybe it’s the article’s amazing music-writer-unifying properties, as the spectacle of rap writers rallying to shoot it down was inspiring.
• OK OK, time for a Happy News Contest… I’ll trot out this one: apologetic Guantanamo guard reunited with ex-inmates via Facebook. How are you gonna top that?
• One more… What movies like Die Hard express about the ways people interact with architecture.

Two Rich Guys Arguing

Jimmy Kimmel lays into Jay Leno on Leno’s own show. Around 1:40, Kimmel dings Leno and Leno refuses to play along. You can see Kimmel’s eyes light up, as he realizes he gets to tee off on Leno for the next four minutes. Jay loses his audience, and all he can do is wait it out. I don’t watch any of these shows, so I don’t really have a dog well-trained competitor in this fight, but Leno is impossible to like at this point.

“Why would anybody ever wanna leave Baltimore? That’s what I’m askin’.”

The new trailer for Treme, the upcoming series by The Wire’s creators:

• Who wouldn’t want to run a company just like Netflix’s after reading this leaked internal memo?
• Considering Slate’s habitual contrarianism, you’d think their readers would come up with more interesting end-of-America scenarios than these. Arab-Israel war will end America? I wasn’t aware America had been relocated. The toy these uncreative types used to come up with the seeds of the apocalypse is pretty fun to fiddle with for at least three minutes, but here’s the real prize: a social network that shows which scenarios were linked to each other. Apparently, Robot Overlords connects to Alien Invasion. Does that mean the robots are in charge of the aliens, too? The future is rich with intrigue. Still, this week’s finest mother lode of semi-useless data: How Different Groups Spend Their Day. Speaking of spending time, if you can’t waste a solid twenty minutes with this chart, then you are just not cut out for charts of any kind.
• Surely you happened to see this Coke vs. Pepsi logo nonsense about 26 times this week. It intends to show, for some reason, that Pepsi’s logo changes every eight minutes while Coke is a solid rock. Here’s the real story: Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, Revised Edition. Survey says Coke changes its logo every bit as often as Pepsi does. And Coke even changed, uh, Coke itself at one point, lest we forget. Who knew Coke had fanboys?

We hope this info helps you plan your next car-buying trip. We also hope you’ll keep us in mind for when you need website design and development!

Supply and demand: the lower the demand, the lower the price.

So when is the demand for cars the lowest?

According to Google Trends, people search car-related keyterms most in the summer and least in the winter, with a small spike right before Christmas.

In case you’ve never used Google Trends: it lets you look at search frequency over time for terms of your choosing. Let’s try the most obvious ones. Car and cars are huge terms, so we get pretty clear data:

The second tier shows more volatility since these terms aren’t quite as popular, but the trend is still apparent.

This last batch is all over the place, but still fits the trend. Somebody went crazy looking to buy car late last year, though!

We were planning on buying a used car by September of this year (which seemed to be the time when most of these lined up, more or less), but after seeing this we might wait until late October. What do you think?

What are some other creative ways to use search engines to your advantage?

3. Seeing these two things within like five minutes of each other: Digg would prefer to not put up with IE6 and Digg is among the slowest 11% of all websites. Did this amuse anybody else?
2. Four dozen husbands
1. Via Rafi Kam: Flaming Garbage Cans in Hip-Hop Videos. What more could you ever ask for?

Special bizarre bonus: In many markets, coming up with a catchy piece of linkbait isn’t all that difficult. But the big, strange market of SEO people selling SEO stuff to other SEO people is different. It’s pretty much all been seen and done, daily. But every now and then somebody gets just weird enough…

EDIT, 4:22 — Need to switch these weeklies up so they can account for things we read on Sundays. Such as: Just read Mark Cuban’s hat-in-the-ring post on this week’s popular Free debate. Mark wins this one by being realistic and thinking from the business point of view… Each company offering Free can’t last forever, but it can make money now. Full disclosure: I haven’t read Chris Anderson’s book that started it all. Mostly because it’s not free.

3. Data lags on Obama’s stylish Web site: The most wonderful quote is probably the one about Obama’s site “projecting” openness. Instead of offering it.
2. The Myth Of Original Creators: A fine look at copyright and creativity, touching on Shakespeare and Robert Johnson. Here’s where the fun really begins — a remixed version of this link could feature the phrase “squirting Brad Pitt’s Poops into a blog,” Techdirt’s article got many more comments than the originals it samples, and Techdirt remixes Rene Kita’s gender by referring to him as a “she.”
   
1. Slow internet week? Not once this marvel turned up on who-knows-which blog (if anyone can tell who found this, please report):