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Combined, the three major blogging platforms -- Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr -- account for 80.5 million unique pairs of eyeballs in October 2011 (Facebook had 139.1 million unique that month.) By the end of 2011, the Nielsen/McKinsey company had tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million in 2006.

Using Correlate, you can upload your own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with that real world trend.

Mary Meeker - October 18, 2011

Tech Trends.

"Throw in a nine-character, mixed-case random password, and while a CPU would take a mind-numbing 43 years to crack this, the GPU would be done in 48 days."

What side of the equation do you want to be on? 

Sales of smartphones were up 74 percent year-on-year and accounted for 25 percent of overall sales in the second quarter of 2011, up from 17 percent in the second quarter of 2010. Android grew to 43.4% marketshare from just 17.2% the previous year. 

Last Friday was my last day at the White House. As I begin my fellowship at Harvard University, I'd like to share my reflections on public service.  "On a bright February day, the previous morning's dusting of snow melting on the ground, I arrived at a White House that was, as the Washington Post put it, "stuck" in the "Dark Ages of technology." In their words, "If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past." As my team congratulated me on the new job, they handed me a stack of documents with $27 billion worth of technology projects that were years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. At the time, those documents were what passed for real-time updates on the performance of IT projects. My neighbor's ten year old could look up the latest stats of his favorite baseball player on his phone on the school bus, but I couldn't get an update on how we were spending billions of taxpayer dollars while at my desk in the White House. And at the same time, the President of the United States had to fight tooth and nail to simply get a blackberry.  These were symptoms of a much larger problem.

Facebook copies Google+'s sharing ideas. .  

An infographic from boston.com that shows where the US' debt has come from by presidential era and who holds the debt as of today.   

Exemplifies the emergence of a networked world.  

But the presence of the police officers in the garage that Friday afternoon in July was anything but ordinary: They were directed to the parking structure by a computer program that had predicted that car burglaries were especially likely there that day. The program is part of an unusual experiment by the Santa Cruz Police Department in predictive policing - deploying officers in places where crimes are likely to occur in the future.

"The relevant point here is not Schmidt's thought on behavior and choice but the fact that, no matter what you choose to do or not do, your life exists in the cloud, indexed by Google, in the background of a photo album on Facebook, and across thousands of spammy directories that somehow know where you live and where you went to high school. These little bits of information exist like digital detritus. With software like PittPatt that can glean vast amounts of cloud-based data when prompted with a single photo, your digital life is becoming inseparable from your analog one. You may be able to change your name or scrub your social networking profiles to throw off the trail of digital footprints you've inadvertently scattered across the Internet, but you can't change your face. And the cloud never forgets a face. "

Use Google's ngram viewer to see how a word (or words) are used across time by searching for their prevalence in books.  

A quiet revolution has been going on in the medical profession and the field of personal health in the last two years, spearheaded by smartphones and tablets, that will change forever the way we obtain and process medical information. Called mHealth (Mobile Health), this industry phenomenon encompasses a wide range of applications - from self-treatment apps on sub-$100 Android phones in Kenya, through texting reminders for the immunization schedule of newborn babies in India, up to testing yourself for STDs with a smartphone kit, or your doctor panning and zooming radiology scans on the go.

Google just shipped a new stable release of the Chrome browser that includes two new technologies: Native Client, which allows execution of C and C++ code within the browser, and the Web Audio API, which brings advanced audio capabilities to JavaScript. 

The apps are Color, Shopkick and IntoNow, all of which activate the microphones in users' iPhone or Android devices in order to gather contextual information that provides some benefit to the user.