Search the world of maps - Wikimapia

I just discovered an interesting service. At Wikimapia you can look at maps and add information about places around the world. It's built on idea of Wikipedia, which lets all users edit and add information. This means that you can search for your favorite places and add information about the place so that the rest of the world can find useful information. I added a tag to my local pizza place in Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm:)

Have you ever wondered what people search for

I knew about Google Labs. Now Microsoft has launched a new lab too. In both labs you can see what's coming next.

Microsoft has a pretty cool tool that gives you information about what people search for after their initial search. Let's say you search for "Pharmacy". The next term a person is likely to search for is onlinepharmacy and then drug, medication, drugstore and Walgreen.

This prediction tool is useful for keyword research, but also for news reporting and brand research. Walgreen obviously has a pretty strong brand recognition when it comes to pharmacy stores.

Alot of interesting tools from Microsoft. Too bad it's not available in Norwegian

Amnesty international campaign

The discussion continues... Yahoo! have supplied email users’ private data to the Chinese authorities, helping to facilitate cases of wrongful imprisonment. Microsoft and Google have both complied with government demands to actively censor Chinese users of their services.

Some character drawings that appeared in a Danish newspaper caused attacks on Scandinavians in the middle east. Now Amnesty International has launched a new campaign to fight for Freedom of expression.

What will happen if someone publishes some controversial pictures or text on Amnesty International's website. Will Amnesty become the target for extremists around the world?

Read more about the Amnesty campaign

How many people are searching for God and terrorism(in Google)?

I'm reading a book called The Secrets of Judas : The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and His Lost Gospel . It's about how the role of Judas in history might have been misunderstood. Interesting reading. It leads me to think about how many people are searching for the truth and searching for God. Well... it might be interesting to look at Google Trends.

Searching for God
As for Norway.. Not surprisingly, it is the people in Kristiansand and Stavanger that perform the most searches for "Gud" (the Norwegian word for God) in Google. Check out the graph

In the US, God is most popular in Cincinatti. See the graph

If you look at the word "Allah", it seems that he's most popular in Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco. See the graph. It's interesting to see that when Israel attacked Hizb Allah positions, searches for Allah grew dramatically.

Searching for terrorism
Is it possible to use search statistics to forecast terror-attacks? Is it surprising that there are alot of people in Pakistan that search for the word terrorism. See which countries in the world search for terrorism.

Kalender