Earlier this year game designer Kyle Gabler put up a just-for-fun side project called Human Brain Cloud – a massively multiplayer word association game that started with a single word (”volcano”) and has since taken on a life of its own. Players are given a word, which is culled from the database of previously entered words, and asked to enter the first thing that comes to mind. As people interact with the game it collects data about word associations that can be formed into a giant network (the cloud).

As Gabler explains, “For instance given the word ‘volcano’, a common word people might submit would be ‘lava’, and this would result in a very strong connection between ‘volcano’ and ‘lava’. On the other hand, given the word ‘volcano’, fewer people might associate it with something like ‘birthday party’, resulting in a very weak connection or no connection at all. Over time and with many players, I hope the cloud will gradually grow to represent words and phrases people tend to associate with other words and phrases, assuming it doesn’t get inundated with spam.”

Since the site’s launch, over a third of a million people have made 5.6 million connections between half a million words. It would appear that Gabler got his wish of many players and a large map of word associations.

In July, Gabler posted some preliminary findings on his company’s blog about what Human Brain Cloud had learned so far. At the time, with about a fifth of the total amount of data that the site has since gathered, the most oft-submitted word was “sex” followed by “me” and then “money.” Gabler concluded snarkily, “If this experiment had an scientific credibility, I’d say humans were more horny than narcissistic or greedy.”

The direction and use of Human Brain Cloud is completely controlled by the people who use it, and interestingly they took the site in some rather unexpected directions. Fairly shortly after launching the experiment, Gabler began to notice that people weren’t just using the site to associate words with other words, but also phrases. Such as, “I am…” with “…a human.” While playing a few minutes ago I was served up “shall inherit the earth,” which I unimaginatively connected with “the meek” (a connection also made by 18 other people).

The strongest connections? "Mona" -> "lisa," "ping" -> pong," "and found" -> "lost" (the latter suggesting that people have no problem making connections even when common phrases are spoken out of order — "found" -> "lost" is also on the top 10 strongest list).

While Gabler likes to joke that the site has no academic value (”This isn’t academically rigorous or anything, so set your expectations accordingly,” he warns on Human Brain Cloud’s about page), recent research indicates that the type of connections the site is revealing may actually have worthwhile academic implications. Researchers at the University of California recently conducted a study in which they found evidence to suggest that our brains catalog and rate the relevance of information by forming connections between data. The researchers compared the brain’s system to Google’s PageRank algorithm, but there are obvious similarities to the massive word association map that the Human Brain Cloud is compiling as well.

Regardless of whether Human Brain Cloud will ever help spur advances in neuroscience, it is a fun way to waste a few minutes.

There are a lot of ways to send large files online. One my favorites is Senduit from Davidville (the Tumblr guys), which I wrote about in April. I like its simplicity and how easy it is to use. Unfortunately, Senduit, which is built on the back of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, has a 100mb file limit and though speedy on the download, requires that the file first be fully uploaded before downloading can begin.

PipeBytes is a new service that cuts out the middle man. The service has no file size limits and lets recipients begin downloading before the file is finished uploading — in fact, that file doesn’t begin to upload until someone starts downloading on the other end. While files are being transferred, a YouTube video plays in the browser window to keep you occupied, and an animated status indicator shows you the progress of your transfer.

I was able to successfully send an 80mb MP3 file to Marshall Kirkpatrick via the service. Though we were both shown different videos, they seems uncannily matched content-wise to the file I was sending — which was a DJ mix, and I was shown a video of a turntable routine. I’m not sure if PipeBytes read the file note I left, which mentioned what type of music the MP3 was, and tried to match up a like video or if it was a coincidence (I think I’d lean toward the latter).

It’s not clear how PipeBytes works, but my guess is that the site is establishes a direct connection between the uploader and downloader. There are a few reasons I think this: 1. Your file doesn’t start uploading until someone is downloading, 2. It can only send to one person at a time, 3. Their FAQ says files “are sent directly to your peer.”

If that’s the case, PipeBytes should be spending virtually nothing on bandwidth. Though it does raise some questions about the usefulness of the service. If all it is doing is establishing a direct connection, what is the advantage over doing the same thing via instant messenger, Skype, or IRC (DCC Send)? The advantage of file sending sites like Senduit is that they allow the downloader to get quicker speeds on their end as a result of getting the files through a faster pipe. Also, they are asynchronous, so uploader and downloader don’t have to be online at the same time. When both of those advantages are removed, why not just use IM?

Inside Facebook reports that Facebook has added new metrics for app developers to track the spread of their application. The new “Application Adds by Facebook Referrer” displays how many application ads were a result of the app directory, the profile box, the news feed, the mini feed, Facebook search, or requests.

These stats will certainly be helpful for app developers to gauge the best way to market and promote their apps, and whether their marketing campaigns on Facebook ad networks like Social Media are worth their time and money. But just how most Facebook apps spread is likely to remain hazy until more data can be gathered from multiple app developers.

Justin Smith has data from a friend’s application, which shows that the profile box is far and away the most popular channel for attracting new users to an application. Surprisingly, given the amount of press about how ingenious the news feed and mini feed are for spreading things virally, they do not factor nearly as much into the overall spread of this particular application. That said, Inside Facebook’s example is a very small sample size for one (undisclosed) application. As Smith notes in his post, “the relative importance of viral channels will depend on your application.”

The Zombies app probably benefits more from requests, for example, because of the way it encourages people to invite users, while the Where I’ve Been app probably gets many installs from the profile box, and the Movies app likely does well in the product directory as a result of its prominence there.

Would any app developers out there care to share some of their data? It would be great if Facebook would release data across the entire network in aggregate, but until that happens, if you want to share trends you’ve notice for your application. please do so in the comments.

At this morning’s keynote at the Adobe MAX event in Chicago, Mark Anders and Steven Heintz of Adobe gave a sneak peek of a new application being developed by the company code-named “Thermo.” Thermo is what they’re terming a “rich internet application design tool.” Its goal is to allow designers to create Flex-based RIAs without the need to touch any code and to create a more seamless workflow between designers and developers.

With Thermo, designers can build a web app UI and the MXML code to control it is automatically rendered by the application. Developers can then access that code and tie the UI to the rest of the application. Some conference attendees were rightly reminded of Visual Basic, but Thermo seems much smarter — and, of course, is aimed at web app developers.

The demo at the conference was very compelling and drew the loudest applause of anything presented. Thermo has basic drawing tools that can be used to wireframe an app, but what really makes Thermo special for designers is that it understands Photoshop images and uses layer data to capture information about various UI elements (the application also plays nice with images from Illustrator and Fireworks). In their demonstration, Anders and Heintz imported a user interface mockup for a music browsing app. Thermo recognized the layer data from the PSD, allowing the duo to easily edit various elements inside the UI.

The presenters really got the MAX crowd rocking by showing off Thermo’s “Convert artwork to…” feature. In a matter of a couple of clicks, a text input box on the UI went from static image to actual form field with the MXML code rendered automatically. Thermo even preserved styling of the form element from the PSD mockup.

The code view for Thermo is actually the full Flex Builder application, which means that it is a powerful development tool for programmers, as well. The idea is that developers can write underlying business logic for a Flex application while designers work on look and feel all from inside the same environment, and the process is as painless as possible for both sides.

Thermo was quickly the most buzzed about thing at the conference, and it was easy to see why. Anders and Heintz turned a static image of a web app interface into a working mockup — complete with dummy lorem ipsum data created by Thermo — in about 15 minutes without touching any code. Thermo allows designers to create interactive Flex-based applications without coding, then hand those apps off to programmers who can complete the development process by adding business logic.

Adobe expects to release an early version of Thermo sometime next year. For now they’ve set up a vague info page on the Adobe Labs site. When it drops, Thermo really could be a game changer that drops the barrier for entry into the web app market just that much more.

Note: Josh Catone is at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago, September 30 – October 3, courtesy of Adobe.

Massively multiplayer online games are big business. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, for example, has over 6 million users paying up to $15/month to log into the game (though an oversimplification, it is probably safe to assume that they’re pulling down in the tens of millions of dollars per month from subscription fees). But running a successful online game is not an easy and can be a very costly endeavor. Scaling a system to support that many users can require a grid of hundreds or thousands of machines, a very fat pipe, and expertise in managing large, distributed systems.

Web application providers are often faced with a similar problem: how to scale their app when it gets popular. In September of last year, Richard MacManus reviewed a new company called 3Tera – whose AppLogic utility computing suite helps web app and software-as-a-service providers to scale their applications. 3Tera’s powerful management solution makes it easy for developers to build, deploy, and monitor virtual server farms across their grid of thousands of commodity servers.

It makes sense then that 3Tera, which touts itself as an expert in the field of utility grid computing, would get into online games, which live and die by their ability to scale to meet the needs of their customers. This week 3Tera announced a partnership with Emergent Game Technologies, the makers of the Emergent Platform, a complete solution for developers of online games that encompasses development, deployment, billing, metrics, scaling, and customer support and relationship management.

According to a press release, the two companies have entered into an agreement to explore the possibility of integrating 3Tera’s AppLogic suite into the next generation of Emergent’s online game development platform. 3Tera hopes their technology will “meet the scale and performance requirements of the high-demand online games industry.”

In our review of 3Tera last year, Richard made the prediction that “in the future specialist companies like 3Tera, along with the big Internet companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, will operate ’server farms’ that become too cost efficient for other companies not to utilize.”

That is essentially what Amazon has done with their Elastic Compute Cloud service. EC2, along with their Simple Storage Service, are pay-as-you-go grid computing services that compete on some level with 3Tera’s AppLogic (though I don’t know that Amazon offers anything to compare to 3Tera’s management tools).

I wonder if the same thing will happen in the world of games. Linden Lab have successfully created a platform for their online virtual world Second Life that can handle 300,000 users logging in ever week. Linden pitches their platform, the Second Life Grid, to businesses and developers, but they still confine development to within the Second Life universe. Would they, like Amazon, consider opening their infrastructure to outside companies wishing to build their own persistent virtual worlds? Would Blizzard do the same with their World of Warcraft platform? Would Turbine?

3Tera and Emergent obviously think there is a market for managed infrastructure solutions for game developers. Considering how much middleware is used by game development studios (most studios create only game content in house, turning to outside companies for things like the 3D engine, sound engine, cinematic production, voice over recording, etc.), and given how expensive massively multiplayer games are to create and deploy it’s not surprising that there is a market here.

Nugs.net is the biggest network of music sites you’ve probably never heard of. Created in 1993 as a place for founder and CEO Brad Serling to keep his growing collection of live Grateful Dead and Phish tapes, the site has since grown into a major force in online music sales, having sold over 50 million paid downloads of live music.

Nugs.net currently powers the online download stores for over 300 artists, including Metallica, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, the Grateful Dead, Widepread Panic and moe. The company also runs download stores for major US music festivals like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza. Via compilations (such as the environmental benefit album “Music for the Planet“) and festivals, Nugs.net has provided live download services for over 400 bands.

How Nugs.net Got Started

When Serling launched the original Nugs.net back in 1993, he had no plans to turn it into a business — he just had a overwhelmingly large tape collection that was getting harder and harder to manage. Because it was getting more and more difficult to trade tapes (and later DATs and CDs) with other fans while on the road following the Grateful Dead and Phish, Serling set up his website as a place for people to download MP3s of his taped concerts. He got permission from the bands to set the site up as long as he wasn’t profiting from it. By 2000, the site was serving 3 million downloads per month and the Grateful Dead took notice, contacing Serling about turning Nugs.net into a business.

In October of that year, the popular touring band Phish was preparing for their last show before what would become a two year hiatus. The band’s management had heard about Serling and his work on Nugs.net from the Grateful Dead and set up a dinner with him on the night of what fans fondly refer to as “The First Last Show Ever.” Serling tells me he and the band “hit it off immediately and saw eye to eye on many important themes (no DRM, allowing tape trading to continue, offering lossless audio) and we made plans to stay in touch during Phish’s hiatus.”

Fast forward two years and Phish was ready to return to touring. The band and Serling cooked up a plan to release every one of the shows from that tour as downloadable MP3s via what would become Live Phish, Nugs.net’s first branded band website.

“I officially created Nugs.net enterprises as an LLC with my attorney/partner Jon Richter in November of 2002, and we charged are first credit card for a download on December 20, 2002, ushering in what is now a common practice of releasing paid downloads of live shows. At the time, no band had ever released every night they played as a download the next day. In fact, iTunes wouldn’t launch for another 7 months.” — Brad Serling

Present and Future

Since that time, Nugs.net has sold over 50 million downloads across their network of paid download stores. The original collection of free audience tapes still exists as the Stash and attracts 3 million downloads per month. Nugs.net operates an online streaming radio station that goes out to over 50,000 listeners and Serling’s live music “nugscast” podcast reaches 70,000 people each month.

Phish was not the first act to release an entire tour as a live set. In 2000, Pearl Jam released their entire tour via a set of officially sanctioned “bootleg” CDs. Serling tells me he met with Pearl Jam in 2001 and advised them to release their tour via the Internet as downloadable media, which they eventually did starting with their 2005 tour via a partnership with basecamp productions. I asked Serling what he thought of Pearl Jam’s early efforts in the live music business that he has helped pioneer. “I think it was ballsy and should certainly be applauded,” he told me, “but it was ultimately problematic that all those live masters were property of Sony and not of the band. Many of the more established artists I work with learned that lesson from Pearl Jam.”

Recently, Nugs.net has begun offering live video alongside their traditional audio product. This is an area that the company plans to explore more in the future, but because there is no standard licensing rate established for music in video, the situation is tricky from a legal standpoint, and Nugs.net has been forced to keep their video library fairly small.

DRM

Though Nugs.net offers custom DRM solutions to its clients, most of them appear to opt not to encumber their downloads with digital rights management. Serling himself takes a rather indifferent view toward DRM. “I’ve often said DRM stands for ‘Doesn’t Really Matter,’” he told me. “While I certainly wish that more people bought than stole from my company and my clients, the reality is that DRM does not solve the problem. People who want to steal will steal and people willing to pay will pay.”

Serling favors a value added approach to selling music. Nugs.net, he says, offers products that consumers can’t get elsewhere (professionally mastered live music the day after a show and live concert videos), and the service also includes “value adds” like downloadable CD and cover art, photos from the shows, and in many cases, high quality FLAC files and an option to purchase a CD copy.

Conclusion

I asked Brad Serling to sum up his thoughts on the future of online music distribution. “Ubiquity,” he said. “All your music everywhere. True music fans will happily pay for the privilege.” And I think he’s right — that’s something I would gladly lay out cash for.

Disclosure: I’ve bought more live Phish shows from their Nugs.net-powered site than I care to admit.

An email arrived yesterday from the guys at Animoto proclaiming that their application, which launches to the public on August 14th, would lead to the “end of slideshows.” Those are rather sensational words, but after taking a look at their app, they might just be right — at least in terms of what’s hot among the social networking set.

Animoto is a web application that renders unique photo montages using impressive motion graphics, effects, and transitions from photos and music that you upload. The software will render something unique on each pass, and the results will be radically different depending on the style of music you choose (i.e., fast paced rock will result in a higher energy, faster video than a slow, trippy electronica song).

The site is built with Ruby on Rails, and uses a liberal dash of AJAX (there aren’t too many full page loads on the site). Animoto also utilizes more than one Amazon web service. Though I wasn’t told which, my guess would be the S3 storage service and the elastic compute cloud service. The site uses Clearspring for their widget hosting.

The key to Animoto is their patent-pending “Cinematic Artificial Intelligence” software, which “thinks like an actual director and editor.” The software analyzes the pictures and music that you input and decides on the proper effects and transitions to match both.

Using Animoto is pretty straight forward. Choose which type of video you’d like to create — 30 second (about 12-15 images) or full length — then upload your images. The image uploader can upload more than one image at once, which is very nice (I used 31 images for my test video embedded below, and uploading each one at a time would have been a time waster).

Once you’ve uploaded your images, you drag and drop them into the order you want them to appear in the finished video, rotate any that need to be rotated, and highlight the ones you want the software to linger over. Then you upload your music or choose from their library (currently about 15 tracks) and render your video. The render process takes about 5-7 minutes, but could take longer depending on load. When you’re video is rendered, Animoto will email you, leaving you free to do other things if the queue for processor time is long. While the video is rendering, Animoto displays a handful of text ads (it doesn’t look like they’re paid ad spots yet, but certainly could be), which appears to be their business model right now.

The finished video product can be emailed or embedded, and Animoto plans to offer ways to download the video to your computer or iPod, or to burn it directly to DVD. You can also remix your projects, either by sending them through the Cinematic AI software again as is and seeing what new result pops out, or by tweaking the order and emphasis of your pictures and changing your music.

I was impressed with the quality of the videos Animoto created. They are more compelling than simple slide shows and I can see how this product could be very popular with social networking users. It is certainly conceivable that Animoto could enjoy the kind of rapid growth that popular MySpace slide show creation apps like Slide and RockYou! have experienced. Animoto could also be useful for jazzing up vacation photos or producing low budget music videos.

It would be great if you could restrict Animoto’s choices to specific effects and transitions, giving the user a little more control over the final output. That said, the software seemed to make pretty good choices on its own. One of the videos I created with Animoto (using photos from stock.xchng) is embedded below:

Bay Partners, a San Francisco area venture capital fund that invests in Eventful, PicksPal, and Riya among others, has announced AppFactory a seed fund aimed at developers on the Facebook Platform. AppFactory will invest $25,000 to $250,000 in each Facebook app as well as offering technical and business assistance and mentoring. The program is being headed by Salil Deshpande and Angela Strange and will specifically target applications being launched for the Facebook platform, or existing companies who are “changing their strategy to become a Facebook focused application.”

The AppFactory investment program joins a pool of new, low-dollar investment funds such as Charles River Ventures’ QuickStart program, Y Combinator, and TechStars. But perhaps it is most comparable to Google’s Gadget Ventures program, because it is focused on a specific platform.

Bay Partners is taking a significant risk by funding Facebook-focused apps, though the investments will be relatively small ones. While there have been a couple of acquisitions of Facebook apps, thus far Facebook has not allowed app creators to monetize their apps (some creative apps or ports of existing applications are monetized via affiliate links or sales of premium services, however). It remains to be seen whether a successful business can be built on top of Facebook, or whether it is wise to so closely tie your business to the fate of another.

Deshpande and Strange think that Facebook has become a “Social Operating System,” and that Facebook’s platform will, like Windows did in the 90s, lead to an economy of third party applications built on top of it. “We are seeing the birth of web platforms, and these platforms become distribution mechanisms for entrepreneurs,” Deshpande told Ajaxian. “We definitely see the open Facebook platform resulting in real, valuable applications.”

I agree with Deshpande that right now the Facebook platform has seen mostly “simple, almost trivial” applications, but with time apps should grow more complex and useful. I remember telling Richard when the Facebook platform was first launched how brilliant I thought the strategy was because one killer app — something that people can’t live without — could cement Facebook as the social platform on the web. By opening up they take the burden off of themselves to come up with it, and let thousands of developers attempt to create that app for them.

With AppFactory, Bay Partners is hoping to get a piece of that killer app when it comes along. The challenge, will be to figure out how to monetize it. Andrew Chen posted recently about how hard it will be to monetize a Facebook widget. “Incorrect conclusions are being drawn from the unmonetizability of some apps that have spread fast on Facebook to date,” said Deshpande. “We are interested in backing entrepreneurs that will be imaginative about what types of applications can be built on Facebook’s Social OS.”

What do you think? Is a Facebook application-centric fund a good idea or a bad one? Will the Facebook platform pay dividends for those investing in it? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Even with consolidation going on left and right, the galaxy of sites that make up what we call “web 2.0″ is expanding at a frantic rate (or perhaps that elusive goal of being snapped up by a bigger fish is helping to drive it). So how do you keep up with this ever growing array of web 2.0 sites? That is, other than reading Read/WriteWeb. The answer: via the ever growing array of web 2.0 lists.

A little over a year ago, Richard MacManus posted his List of Web 2.0 Lists. Just 13 months later a lot of those links are dead, or no longer being updated, and there is a whole crop of new sites that we can now add to our arsenal. Below I will endeavor to update Richard’s list with new sites and those that are still in business.

• eConsultant: Web 2.0 Directory – It appears not to have been updated in nearly a year, and is (hopefully) the only inclusion on this list that’s not up-to-date. But because eConsultant’s massive list is categorized so well, it is still very helpful.
• NEOBinaries – These guys keep a large, categorized list of web 2.0 sites on hand, updated Monday – Friday.
• BuzzShout – BuzzShout is similar to NEOBinaries — a big list of web 2.0 companies that you can rate and review. Nicely categorized.
• Go2Web2.0 – A really great flash-based list organized by tags, and a displayed using a dizzying array of logos. Clicking on a logo brings up a concise overview of that company or application.
• All Things Web 2.0 – This is where Christian Mayaud’s Sacred Cow Dung list ended up. It’s mostly up-to-date and obsessively categorized.
• Web2.0List – Categorized by tags, Web2.0List is just what it sounds like.
• Web2.0Logo – A sister site to Web2.0List, but this time with an emphasis on logos.
• Dexly – Dexly tracks over 3,000 web 2.0 companies in 53 categories, including blogs that write about web 2.0 (like this one).
• SimpleSpark – SimpleSpark lists web applications and is adding apps at a frenetic pace. They launched in May and earlier this month crossed the 3,000 applications mark.
• FeedMyApp – The new kid on the block, FeedMyApp launched just this month but already lists 299 apps in 36 categories.
• HappyCodr – HappyCodr is a list of Ruby on Rails-powered web sites. It’s not strictly about web 2.0, but given web 2.0’s infatuation with Rails you’ll find a lot of neat web apps and social sites on the list (mixed in with the occasional content site backed by a Rails-based CMS).
• Startup Search – Startup Search takes a different approach than the other lists in this round up, focusing on the people and funding behind web 2.0 companies rather than on the products.
• Museum of Modern Betas – MoMB is a great daily blog by Saurier Duval about all things beta.
• eHub – Emily Chang’s eHub is another must read daily blog covering new web 2.0 sites.
• Everything 2.0 – Bob Stumpel’s link blog is yet another great daily look at new web 2.0 companies.
• TechCrunch Company Index – Speaking of great blogs, our friends over at TechCrunch review a lot of web 2.0 companies. Luckily for us, they tag each one and arrange all the tags into a helpful company index.
• Listio’s Everything Web 2.0 Directory – Listio’s directory lets anyone submit new web 2.0 sites and then vote on them digg-style. Browsable by tags.
• KillerStartups – Another digg-style community directory of web 2.0, organized by categories.
• Progammable Web’s Mashup Directory – While this isn’t a general web 2.0 directory, many things we call mashups fall under the 2.0 umbrella, so this is a great resource for web 2.0 watchers nonetheless.
• Webware’s Top 100 – The recently completed Top 100 competition from CNet’s Webware blog isn’t the most comprehensive list, nor the most scientific way to find the top web apps, but even so, it’s a list of 100 apps that any web 2.0 fan will want to be aware of.
• SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards – The 2007 edition of SEOmoz’s awards lists over 200 web 2.0 sites in 41 categories.

Conclusion

I think its safe to say that there are more sites devoted to tracking web 2.0 now than there were when Richard made his original list in May 2006. More than a few entries on Richard’s list were links to blog posts consisting of giant lists of web 2.0 sites, which have since evolved into full fledged directories or up-to-date daily link blogs. If you know of any other good web 2.0 directories or lists, please mention them in the comments.

Akamai Technologies delivers 15-20% of all web traffic each day, which puts them in a unique position to monitor the status of the global web. This week, they released their previously customers-only web performance visualization tools to the public. The set of six flash-based visualizations let users identify how data is moving across the Internet in real-time.

The flagship app is the Real-time Web Monitor, which shows the countries (or Canadian provinces or American states) that are experiencing the most traffic load. As I write this, California and the United Kingdom are together accounting for 15.5% of global data requests. The app also lets you view the ten worst performing cities (Hong Kong and Tokyo are really hurting right now), and the area experiencing the most outside attacks on the network. (Venezuela is not a safe place to be a server this afternoon.)

The Visualizing Akamai tool shows the mind boggling number of visitors per minute make up just the 20% of the world’s Internet traffic that the company handles. The Network Performance Comparison appears to be just a marketing tool to show how much better Akamai’s network is (fun to play with, but not as useful as the others, in my opinion).

In addition to the three web performance visualizations, Akamai offers three performance indexes: News, Retail, and Music. They show traffic trends in different market sectors. For example, you can see the peak shopping times in different parts of the world. The retail graph also shows spikes around certain major shopping times of the year (there is a spike shortly before Mother’s Day on the current five-month graph — I’d expect a big spike later in the year right after Thanksgiving in the US: the official start to the Christmas shopping season here).

Above is a picture of the music index, but my favorite is the news usage visualization. The news index is neat because it has a list of the news events that caused the greatest spikes in traffic to news sites since Akamai started tracking in 2005. Interestingly, they’re mostly all sports related. Taking the top spot? Ghana eliminates the US in the World Cup last June. Second and third is the first day coverage of the US college basketball playoffs for the past two years. The first non-sports news is the death of Anna Nicole Smith last February, which checks in at number four, and just 6 of the top 15 news-related traffic spikes are non-sports items.

Akamai also offers desktop widgets for its three net usage indexes. The widgets use Yahoo! Widget Engine for Windows and OS X’s dashboard widgets for Mac.

Akamai’s data visualization tools are attractive and addictive and a fun way to keep tabs on what’s going on across the global net — trafficwise, anyway. (Other net traffic visualizations include the Internet Health Report and the Internet Traffic Report.)