Several days after his death, the implications of the assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn were still reverberating round the world - and the net. Webloggers around the world were chewing over the implications of his death: for democracy, rightwing politics, for the Netherlands.
How can we be sure that so many netizens were taking an interest? After all, weblogs are scattered across the net, published by individuals, not corporations, esoteric in their choice of subject and often read by tiny - by mass media standards - audiences. Most of us only dip a toe into this electronic soup, and read no more than a handful of blogs in a week. Meanwhile, keeping track of a range of mainstream media headlines is notoriously difficult, for search engines and surfers.
The answer lies in a raft of new tools that are emerging to take the temperature of the net: services that manage to follow what this electronic Babylon is saying, make connections among all the messages, and prove in a scientific way where the zeitgeist is headed.
My information on the Pim Fortuyn discussions came from Blogdex, a creation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. Blogdex scans weblogs, indexing the links that each weblog makes. By looking at who is linking to what, a picture emerges of what is grabbing the imagination, and comment, of webloggers.
Not everything they talk about is as serious as an assassination, mind you. Number two on Blogdex on the same day was a story from the Santa Cruz Sentinel on the delicate matter of Gillian Greensite and her sculptured Eugenia shrubs. They were proving an eyesore to some of her neighbours on account of them being shaped like 20-foot phalluses. Ms Greensite said there was no resemblance: more than a few bloggers were disagreeing.
Daypop is a site often mentioned in the same breath as Blogdex, although it does a slightly different job. Daypop presents itself as a bare-bones search engine of news. You can search for references to specific events and people who are in the news now: Daypop, which has a narrower but more frequently updated index than most search engines (only 7,000 sites are searchable) should catch breaking news early on. The site also includes a top 40 of links, and a list of the top online news stories. Rocketnews also lets you search current news, and has a "Rocket News monitor" that sits on your desktop with the latest headlines, and a search box.
Of course, you might find these automated search engines, charts and listings a little cold - weblogging, after all, has strong personalities and heartfelt opinions at its heart. In that case, the giant collaborative weblog at Metafilter might be more your bag. Membership has frozen at the 14,000 contributor mark, which means you won't be able to join in yourself, but watching from the sidelines as members fish out interesting snippets from the web can be entertaining. The quirky Memepool covers an eclectic range of websites, less newsy but often more wide-ranging than Metafilter.
But it's not just bloggers who can define the internet zeitgeist. At the Yahoo portal, a tally is kept of the news stories and photographs most forwarded on by readers: the kind of stories that (sometimes) can brighten up a dull day at the office.
When we looked in earlier this week, a New Scientist story was top of the pops. The subject? Research that showed having a son can shorten a woman's life by eight months, while having a daughter can lengthen it by five. That the figures were drawn from research among northern Scandinavian communities between the 17th and 19th centuries might have been ignored by weary modern mothers nodding in agreement as they forwarded it on.
Meanwhile, check out the search spy function at a few search engines - looking at Search UK's spy page provided an entertaining diversion, as it updates every few seconds with the latest queries. They range from the banal ("barnet college sustainable management") to the unsuccessful ("adult movis").
But perhaps the best survey of search engine preoccupation comes from Google, and its Google Zeitgeist page. Every week - sometimes more often - the Googlers pick out interesting trends from the millions of searches being put through the engine. Last month, Google received more queries in Spanish than in Japanese for the first time. An accompanying chart showed a big blue swath to denote the English-speaking majority of searchers - but showed it becoming narrower to the right as a rainbow of other languages nudged towards 50% this year.
How long, we must wonder, before the ever-changing zeitgeist is in a language we don't understand?
