Freedom Footbags

I have–what some might call–an unhealthy obsession with tracking footbag on the world wide web. I read a whole bunch of different feeds from various aggregation services that keep the pulse of the intarweb and reports on whenever someone mentions the word “footbag” (or a good selection of pseudonyms such as “hacky sack”, or “hackey”).

Google is still undoubtedly the king of search engines, and receives billions of queries a day (question: who was answering all of those questions before Google?). Being the kind, open geeks that they are, the folks at Google provide its users with an (anonymized) zeitgeist of any given term that you care to monitor. This makes tracking the web-based popularity of certain terms/subjects such as “footbag” very easy.

The information is broken down into three vectors: Regions, Cities, and Languages. This georeferencing of searches yields very interesting results and, in the case of both “footbag” and “hacky sack”, highlights distinct cultural differences, as well as a general, potentially disturbing trend.

Footbags’ Popularity is on the Wane

At least on the internet it is. Since 2004, witness the steady decline in footbag-related searches. Compared to hacky sack, the situation doesn’t seem to be any better.

Europeans Know it as Footbag

While it appears that N. Americans are stuck in fad-brand-advertising hell. Virtually no one here searches for ‘footbag’; it’s all about ‘hacky sack’

Why?

I don’t suppose anyone has any thoughts on why footbag-related searches have been on the decline? The numbers looked pretty good around ‘04, so what’s happened since then? Maybe sites like YouTube have pulled traffic from the main search engine? What do you think? What can we do to change it?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Allan's Journal, Footbag Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.