the shallow thoughts of a simple mind

Yesterday Google released a whole bunch of new or revised products. The most interesting in my mind is Google Trends which lets you compare the volume of searches for any search term you choose. I’m not entirely sure if there is any value to the tool other than for the curious but I do find the trends to be interesting. One could argue that this isn’t really all that accurate for comparing the popularity of topics because there are a lot more factors governing mindshare than how often someone Googles the product/idea/word but at the very least Trends shows what the majority of web surfers are looking for.

Another interesting development is Google Notebook… their blog post states:

Google Notebook (which we’ll be launching next week) is a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you’re searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others.

Now this sounds like a wonderful idea. I’m not sure exactly how they are planning to implement this but I have a feeling that it is going to be something like a combination Flickr Delicious. I hope they have the good sense to allow users to put in free-form notes in rich text, I know that personally I find sending notes-to-self in Gmail rather clunky and a web based notebook would be nice. I can also see how this would affect college students, now you can have one person (the smart kid) go to class and take notes in his Google Notebook to share with the rest of the class… the possibilities are endless. We will have to see how this one plays out; given Google’s track record there is a 25% chance that this is a total flop.