The Year of the Pig and Britney Spears

Hi folks -- Happy Chinese New Year; as you might have heard, it's the Year of the Pig, which may or may not bring disaster.

That really doesn't help my long term planning.

I think I'll be heading into DC in a few minutes, but not for any Chinese New Year celebrations in DC's Chinablock (DC's Chinatown is pretty small, and is also full of traditional Chinese-themed establishments like Hooters and Urban Outfitters).

In other news, I was going through my morning links, and came across this section of popurls.com:

Video.aol.com's section on Popurls is all-Britney.

[Popurls is a links site that aggregates or "scrapes"
content from a bunch of other popular links sites; it can be a little
overwhelming, but it's awfully useful. It's similar to a feedreader,
except you can't customize the content. By monitoring popular links
sites, it's useful when you see that a bunch of different sites are
talking about the same stories.]

As you can see, the section featuring videos from video.aol.com is all-Britney (as of this writing).

I was curious to see if this was real or an error, so I went to "Most Popular AOL Videos: Now" category:

It was worse than I thought.

The first page of 12 videos was all-Britney.

Now, I don't know precisely how the most popular videos on that page are determined, and to some extent, we may be promoting Britney videos from high-traffic pages (influencing the results), but it still shows that despite wars, blizzards, genocides, terrorism and the like, we still do loves our celebrity meltdowns.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: chinese new year, year of the pig, britney spears, popurls, chinablock, aol video