What we're looking for

It's always interesting to me how obsessed many non-journalists are with media outlets. Mix that passion in with an oft-uneven grasp of the facts and you get all sorts of entertaining screeds against 'the media'.

Every so often along with all the bluster comes a bit of substance (sometimes unwittingly). Check out this dissection of CNN.com, highlighting how little actual news the homepage provides.

It's no shock to anyone who uses the site on a daily basis--after all, CNN.com exists for many purposes, only one of which is to provide users with hard news (it's touching how upset people still get over what they perceive as journalistic sins). Still, it's a bit surprising how far CNN has strayed from Ted Turner's vision.

It's funny, though, that the blogger goes on to use China's Xinhua news service as an example of a site that features hard news. He's obviously got no idea what Xinhua is (just because the stories sound serious doesn't mean it's good journalism). Not to mention he's assuming if Xinhua had access to the technical bells and whistles and non-news content of CNN, they'd still 'opt' for their bare-bones look.

It's a common pitfall of many critics of America and American-run institutions. Other countries aren't purer, or somehow less crass. They often just don't have a choice.

And when they do have a choice, it turns out people are pretty much the same everywhere. Check out Google's list of what people in various countries are searching for.

A cursory scan of the search terms I can recognize shows people from Turkey to Argentina are into music, television and sports. Paris Hilton is on just about everyone's top ten, Malaysians have discovered Friendster, Israelis are into buying cameras (does B&H know?!), our neighbors to the north like YouTube, the French search for soccer, Greeks for Shakira, Japanese for Japanese stars, Norway for Jessica Alba,--and the top search in India is for English-German dictionary, in the UK for the Mayo Clinic?!

Vietnam seems to be the most serious country (top searches are for news sites and test scores), but that may just be because early adopters tend not to be frivolous. Likewise, Russian searches are dominated by things like real estate and legal services.

I wonder if any international consulting firms turn Google's monthly 'Zeitgeist' results into reports....

Zeitgeist work by William T. Ayton via his website.