Dashboard Spy, e-mailed this link with a commentary in a Business Week Blog. Now it was just a quick note so I don’t know if Spy was pointing out the humor (or perhaps DUH! factor) of the large spike in ‘Beer’ at St. Patrick’s Day. But we’ll set that aside for a moment.

The chart, which is a featured report from BlogPulse tracks the buzz of various alcoholic spirits over time. The most obvious spike was the aforementioned beer spike but there’s an interesting spike for Vodka right around New Year’s and then a more convential spike for Wine around the holidays. Aside: the cyclical trend makes me wonder if bloggers blog about drinking more often on the weekend (or just after the weekend)

Stephen Baker, in his blogspotting blog points out that some of the terms tracked like ‘Gin’ often return results for farming (e.g. Cotton Gin) instead of the beverage. His point, it seems, is to show how ‘dumb’ systems like search have a difficult time attaching meaning to a term and so search in general and analytics suffer because of it. That’s true - sort of. Think about how Search companies have tried to solve the problem. Back in the early days, Yahoo! was just a directory service - they used people to organize all those web pages in a meaningful way. Google’s play is page rank which infers meaning based on the number of links into a page (yes it’s a simplification).

So the point is, not that these systems are ‘dumb’ because hey - they are - we made them that way, but that they are good at matching.

People are good at analysis which in my world means that we’re good at figuring out what something means and whether or not that meaning is relevant to the question we are trying to answer.

So what’s my point? The BlogPulse chart, left to it’s own, is just a curiosity. If an analyst were paying attention to it, instead of just letting the system run it, and improving the validity of the data, then it is a tool because the data has an accurate and understood meaning.