Did we really need a mathematically-ranked, up-to-the-minute amalgamation of the utterances of millions of everyday citizens to give us this snapshot of our collective attention span? Chris Brown, Paranormal Activity, Snow Leopard, Kobe Bryant … man, you could have predicted those topics by lazily wandering down to your local newsstand like once a month and noting the boldface names on the magazines. The overmind appears to be spending a lot of time ZOMGing over the same stuff as the undermind, as it were.

—Clive Thompson discusses the problem of trending topics over on Collision Detection – he’s pointed to some nifty solutions, including Flocking Me.