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In political time, September 3 seems centuries ago. That's when I wrote a post about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's wild popularity among Internet searchers. It seems no one could get enough of the newly minted GOP vice presidential candidate. As TIME Magazine's Bill Tancer reported then:

In the week ending Aug. 30, 2008, searches for Governor Palin were almost four times as popular as Obama searches, eight times as popular as McCain searches and over 10 times more popular than searches for Biden.

Palin may have lost this election, but according to a new Newsweek article, when Google unveiled its massive year-end Zeitgist report  (which is a must-read) yesterday, Sarah Palin was the world's fastest rising search term in 2008. And according to reporter Barrett Sheridan, the Alaska governor's popularity went beyond her own name:

She (Palin) coined or was somehow related to four of the election season's top 10 most popular buzzwords: "maverick," "bridge to nowhere," "lipstick [on a] pig," and "hockey mom." The most sought-after catchphrase, however, was "Joe the Plumber." Perhaps Joe should capitalize on his popularity and heed the calls for him to run for the House of Representatives in 2010.

And Palin affected Google searches in other ways. Take a look at this Fey Accompli:

For the most part, the list of most popular political news sources is predictable. Fox, CNN and ABC lead the way, with Web-only sites like The Drudge Report and The Huffington Post also making an appearance on the top 10 list. But the ninth most popular news site is a surprise: "Saturday Night Live." Tina Fey's spot-on Palin impression certainly deserves credit for giving the 33-year-old franchise renewed relevance. (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, strangely, are nowhere to be found.)

In the end, though, Google searches reflected political reality: "Obama" was the most popular search term on Google this year in absolute terms.

Check out the whole report -- it's an amazing glimpse into what people around the world are searching for.

Here at NDN and our affiliate, the New Politics Institute, we have long argued that new tools and media have revolutionized 21st century politics and advocacy forever. At the core of our argument has been our New Tools Campaign -- eight new tools we believe can and have changed how progressives communicate with a new America.

President-elect Barack Obama used these new tools and media to run the most effective presidential campaign in modern history -- if not all history -- and we believe that he will reivent the presidency in much the same way. Simon has done close to a dozen interviews on what shape such an Obama presidency could take, including articles you can find here and here. 

Which leads me to the reason for my post. Not politics. Not advocacy. But it is about the Internet. And it does have to do with Internet searches. Plus, it's just a cool story.

Today's New York Times reports that Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, has launched Google Flu Trends. The idea is pretty simple: if they are feeling poorly or having flu-like symptoms, people tend to turn to the Internet and search using terms like "muscle aches" or "flu symptoms," according to the New York Times article.

Google will monitor the numbers of searches are on a regional and state basis and thus may be able to predict flu outbreaks, alerting people and possibly saving lives, says the paper. The searches will be aggregated to protect peoples' privacy. Yahoo has conducted a study based on data that found similar data.

An excerpt from the article:

Early tests suggest that the service may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some public health experts say that could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives.

It could also offer a dose of comfort to stricken individuals in knowing that a bug is going around.

“This could conceivably provide as early a warning of an outbreak as any system,” said Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C. Ms. Finelli noted that people often search the Internet for medical information before they call their doctor.

"The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” Ms. Finelli said. Between 5 and 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, Ms. Finelli said, leading to an average of roughly 36,000 deaths. Google Flu Trends (www.google.org/flutrends) is the latest indication that the words typed into search engines like Google can be used to track the collective interests and concerns of millions of people, and even to forecast the future.

“This is an example where Google can use the incredible systems that we have to come up with an interesting, predictive result,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. “From a technological perspective, it is the beginning.”

For now the service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide.

The premise behind Google Flu Trends has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu.

“In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Philip M. Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and a co-author of the study based on Yahoo’s data.

A note of interest: Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, endorsed Obama and was at the President-elect's economic summit last Friday in Chicago. New tools in politics, new tools in medicine.

The Nielsen Company, famous for its tracking of all things media, released its results of Internet ratings from both conventions. The results tracked the Web buzz of speakers at both conventions during the respective weeks of their speeches. While Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made significant gains over the two weeks of the survey based on searches on ask.com of, "Who the hell is Sarah Palin," the presidential candidates remained the focus of Internet searches, with U.S. Sen. Barack Obama remaining the king of Internet buzz followed by U.S. Sen. John McCain. Sarah Palin came in third followed by U.S. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Fred Thompson, who spoke at the Republican Convention, finished 16th on the list, but his results could have been slightly inflated due to Bravo showing Days of Thunder on the Wednesday night on which Fred plays the role of NASCAR commissioner "Big" John.

Nielsen also tracked visits to the candidates' official Web sites. During the Democratic Convention, BarackObama.com saw a 32% spike in traffic. During the same period, JohnMcCain.com saw a 242% increase in traffic after his announcement of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Perhaps people were trying to figure out, "Who the hell is Sarah Palin?"

An interesting statistic that I hope Nielsen provides in the coming weeks is how many people visited BarackObama.com following Palin's speech at the Republican Convention. Interestingly, the Obama campaign reported raising $10 million in 24 hours following her scathing remarks.

Finally, The Nielsen survey looked at Google search ads purchased by the campaign. McCain stepped up his Web search presence with a nearly three-fold increase in image-based impressions in August.  During the same period, Obama's campaign cut their image-based impressions by 18%.  Some of the search phrases purchased by McCain's campaign include: Joe Biden, U.S. Economy, and Housing Crisis according to Silicon Valley Insider.

For more about Online Advertising, checkout NPI's 2008 New Tools Campaign paper, Advertise Online.

For those that like to follow the money trail, The Huffington Post has a new page called Fundrace 2008, which features a nice Google maps mash-up tracking the larger individual campaign donations. You can enter your address to take a look at what kind of donations your neighbors are making or zoom out to get a sense of where the candidates are getting their big donor support.

A few bloggers have cleverly used this tool to point out another manifestation of the Microsoft-Google rivalry. Google employees gave more to Obama, while Microsoft workers, overall, threw their monetary support behind Hillary. Could these two tech giants present a metaphor for the competing candidates' arguments? The older, more established, more experienced Microsoft vs. a younger company representing a different generation and a bottom-up business model...There might be something there.

This new web tool should be commended as it shines a little more sunslight on our politicial process; on the other hand, I imagine that for those that donate it could start to feel a little too sunny.

At the end of last week, the leaders of Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, finally announced the five areas that they will focus their money and attention in the coming years. In the language that we use around NDN and the New Politics Institute, the areas are five 21st century challenges that the old politics of the 20th century has ignored but that the new politics of this century needs to address.

I sat in on the conference call they held with Larry Brilliant, the head of Google.org, and he outlined the plan to take an initial $25 million and support organizations or invest in companies in each of these five spaces. They are:

• “Developing renewable energy cheaper than coal.” This is the holy grail of the green tech world, and Google is going to help make this happen as fast as possible.
• “Accelerate the commercialization of plug-in electric vehicles.” Which ties into the first one, because once the electric grid is running off clean energy, then the plug-ins leverage that same clean energy source.
• “Fuel the Growth of Small and Medium-sized enterprises in the developing world.” This fills the gap between the World-Bank level infrastructure projects, and the Grameen Bank micro-loan space. In between, there are the bulk of job-producing small business which need capital and resources too.
• “Inform and Empower to Improve Public Services.” This leverages one of Google’s core competencies of aggregating good information and getting it into the hands of those who can make for change. It can involve simple things like getting the information of results about kid’s schools in rural areas to the authorities and international agencies who might be able to help.
• “Predict and Prevent.” This is all about getting early warning system in place to detect the outbreaks of any pandemics that might arise, like Bird Flu. This stems from Brilliant’s personal interest in this area.

I know Brilliant from pre-Google days, and his personal story is a fascinating one, one that I laid out in a lengthy magazine-length interview earlier this decade. In short, Brilliant was part of the team the helped eradicate smallpox in the 1970s, a daunting 20th century challenge that we definitively solved.

Onto this century’s challenges….

Peter Leyden
Director of the New Politics Institute