Two groups that benefit immensely from Christmas morning: app developers and the Catholic Church

Ah, Christmas morning. If you have children under 11, you’re probably up at 5am. It’s undoubtedly a magical time, but we hardly associate it with money — in fact, most people are off, most places are closed, and you’re probably… Continue Reading

2

WhatsApp might be poised to take over the world (provided it hasn’t already)

Check out this chart, which I found over on Quartz: The dominant social messaging app all over the world (in terms of areas, not necessarily per capita) is a thing called WhatsApp, which I had admittedly only heard of once… Continue Reading

1

On loving lists, or how I learned to stop worrying and embrace the future of the Internet

December is inextricably tied up with lists. One of the main songs we hear during the month contains the phrase “making a list, checking it twice…” We want to recap the year and rank everything possible — movies, TV shows, searches,… Continue Reading

Google Zeitgeist: Paul Walker, Cory Monteith, Aaron Hernandez, Travyon Martin and more confirm we’re really into death and bad things

I’m obsessed with Google Zeitgeist. Think about this: the site may be responsible for 100 billion searches per month. As a result, any snapshot data it gives you on a year has to be somewhat interesting, no? Here’s a good rundown of some… Continue Reading

1

Is someone like Jenna Marbles the future of the content medium?

I was looking around for some info to write a post about YouTube trends in 2013 — I honestly think YouTube is one of the coolest things that has ever graced the collective thing we call society — and came… Continue Reading

1

They apparently love tagging pictures on Instagram in Bangkok

More fun with 2013 trends: this time, Instagram released its top geo-tagged locations of 2013. In the top 10 are some places you’d expect — Times Square, both Disneyland and Disney World, and the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas. But none of… Continue Reading

3

The Harlem Shake: Ties to New York and Queensland, yet staggeringly popular in Poland

‘Tis the season for those year-end trend reports from organizations with a lot of data, and Facebook went big with their post yesterday. Here’s the official post, which is a little generic: for example, it lists the “top 10 life events”… Continue Reading

5

The media game has changed, and people still seem confused by why

There have been a couple of interesting articles recently about the presence of “viral media” (more on that in a second). There was a profile of Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman in The Wall Street Journal, including Zimmerman’s traffic chart as compared to other… Continue Reading