It turns out that Google’s Usenet archive is pretty useful for tracking the lifecycles of Internet fads.
August 25, 2004: At Nelson’s request, the data has been updated to July 2004.
2000:
Aug: 0
Sep: 1
Oct: 0
Nov: 8
Dec: 26
2001:
Jan: 267
Feb: 3160
Mar: 7070
Apr: 3880
May: 2950
Jun: 2210
July: 1870
Aug: 1520
Sep: 1360
Oct: 1460
Nov: 1040
Dec: 1010
2002:
Jan: 964
Feb: 743
Mar: 990
Apr: 845
May: 599
Jun: 389
July: 585
Aug: 452
Sep: 422
Oct: 352
Nov: 270
Dec: 293
2003:
Jan: 249
Feb: 553
Mar: 367
Apr: 417
May: 165
Jun: 1390
July: 654
Aug: 706
Sep: 358
Oct: 221
Nov: 187
Dec: 169
2004:
Jan: 188
Feb: 223
Mar: 430
Apr: 298
May: 136
Jun: 110
July: 271
I was going to say that you could probably do something similar with daypop, although usenet is probably a slightly wider sample of net users as a whole. really, if you combined google groups, daypop, and were able to mine through hotmail, aol, and yahoo email traffic, you could probably track trends like this pretty exactly.
The problem with Daypop is that it’s not currently possible to track trends through time, since they don’t list the date that a site was first mentioned on a weblog; only the date that the site was last cached.
Blogdex doesn’t have that problem, though.
HSX.com for memes?
Hmm, not a bad idea. It’d be easy to track memes with a combination of Google/Usenet/Daypop, if you could narrow the meme to a single key phrase (e.g. “all your base”) or a URL (e.g. http://www.hamsterdance.com/).
I’ll be sure to start work on that in my copious free time.