Professor Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard Law School has been known to refer to the Internet as "autistic." No, he's not talking about your average Wikipedia editor with Aspergers who wears sweatpants to a job interview and subsists on Flutie Flakes, Mountain Dew, and old Wolfenstein ROMs. True, there are people on the Internet who could fly themselves to Mars and back if only we had invented an engine that runs on awkward, but that's not the point here.

What Zittrain means is that on the Internet, you don't have a sense for what is going on around you. Even though there are many people on the web, it's been hard to visualize them as experiencing the same sites you do, since when you visit a website or query Google it feels like you're the only person looking for ladyboy manga porn at that one time. At least, I know I do, and it's a lonely feeling. I myself usually try to surpass this sense of loneliness by only searching for ladyboy manga porn in the company of other people, but I had to give this up too after I gave gramma a heart attack and almost ruined Christmas.

But there is a new tool out there for those people who are interested in searching what everyone else is searching for, and finding something potentially horrible or absurd about their collective fellow man in the process. In this week's Goldmine, the forums goons take a look at some of the funny, interesting, or absurd trends in people's search patterns. It's cool, although it makes me wonder what James Surowiecki would think if he knew the wisdom of crowds was so focused on anal sex and Ireland. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some googling to do.

