I love Google Insights because I love data and data analysis. I’ve used this tool for a long time for keyword research, audience research, for timing campaigns for clients and lots of other stuff. I thought I’d use it tonight to see what body part people are most interested in (you know the crude saying, “tits or ass?”) and it came up some really interesting stuff which I’ll share here. I’ll probably get a tonne of weird porno people coming to my site now but what the hell, this is interesting stuff to me so here goes. Data is based on Worldwide searches in Google from November 2005 to November 2010.

Leaderboard of body parts / key

I put a bunch of body parts that people looking for porn on the internet are likely to put into Google Search. It only lets you compare five. “porn” itself was way way off the scale, and “vagina” was just below “dick” in terms of popular searches. So, we see that we have “ass” as the number one body part, followed by “tits”. “penis” and “boobs” are tied and “dick” comes last. Interesting.

Has it always been this way? Well, no.

Here we see that over the last couple of years, “ass” has grown in popularity, particularly in the past year, having been much closer to “tits” in 2005-2008. In contrast, “tits” has fallen and if it continues to do so, will be overtaken by “boobs”. “penis” and “dick” have remained relatively stable.

Do worldwide tastes differ? Let’s take a look. Here’s a heatmap of how interests in “ass” have spread across the world in the past five years:

Yes, the country most interested in “ass” is a small African country called Eritrea. Other countries at the top of the interest chart for each word are: “tits” in Canada, “penis” in Papua New Guinea, “boobs” in Pakistan and “dick” in New Zealand.

In related search terms, the top related search for all words was “big whatever” e.g. “big tits”, except “penis” where “big penis” was outdone by “the penis”. Weird.

You can see and play around with all this data yourself on Google Insights for Search here.

Next I should do the same thing for kinky sex acts and see what’s most popular and where. This is fun!

Also if you like this kind of research, you’ll like OKCupid’s blog – OK Trends. It’s great.

Tonight was the launch party of Levi’s brand new ‘Shape What’s to Come‘ – a social network for women who work in the creative industries, for positive social change. The site has its public beta launch this coming Monday. I was invited by Levi’s PR agency, Edelman, with some classic blogger outreach ticking all the boxes (transparency, exclusive event invite, flattery, personalised email explaining why I was invited in particular, no press release attachment). So I was invited due to my work in social media for non-profits.

The party was at Levi’s flagship store on Regent Street in London. I arrived, wearing Primark jeans and a band t-shirt. Downstairs was a free bar and a bunch of ‘mood boards’ for want of a better term, created by SWTC ambassadors. The discussion was chaired by Annie Mac and the ambassadors included Kathryn Ferguson (filmmaker), Justice Williams (Tru Life magazine), Kristin Knox (fashion blogger), Ikonika (DJ/producer) and Anna Murray & Grace Winteringham (Patternity).

I’d guess that the crowd was 95% female, 95% aged 18-30 and quite racially diverse. It was also 95% stylish and 75% good looking IMO (which is pretty high). Once I’d finished objectifying my sisters, I thought I’d better listen to the discussion. Overall it was quite generic with people saying how important confidence and dedication is, how they don’t like being defined by being female etc. 

Then Jane Bradley one of the organisers of Ladyfest 10 dared to utter the F word. What did our panelists think about Feminism? This caused a wave of nervous giggles and awkward expressions, and one by one the female role models on stage explained that they were not feminists. Patternity said they were women but weren’t working to exclusively help women (as if feminism doesn’t help men?!), and said, “this isn’t a feminist cult!”. At this point the woman in front of me said to her companion, “why are they all so fucking scared of being feminist?”. Hurrah that woman. Out of the six women on stage, only one was brave enough to come out as a feminist. That was Kristin Knox. She then talked about boy bloggers in fashion and mentioned something about gay and straight people that seemed a bit out of context but well done for trying to bring in the subject of sexuality anyway

Overall the discussion was a bit disappointing in its lack of depth or feminist  analysis for me, but it was probably appropriate for the majority of the crowd who seemed to be interested in creative industry entrepreneurship and business rather than women working for social change. In fact, it wasn’t that clear what the ambassadors were doing in the field of social change. They seemed to be successful female role models though, and there was a little discussion about challenges with making money, and the struggles some had gone through financially.

After the talks was more networking time, then a surprise performance from The Noisettes, which was excellent and made me wish I’d brought a proper camera. The event was let down by not having any free wifi that I could find, and uncertainty of what hashtag to use. We also all got a 30% discount voucher for Levi’s which was nice. I had to leave early so missed the DJ set by Ikonika.

So this social network is clearly a branding and CSR endeavour by Levi’s and I’m interested to see how it goes. I met some good people tonight too and I think they got their target audience right. I now want to find out what Levi’s CSR policies are in term of slave labour etc. I know Primark are bad, but my reasoning for shopping there is that it’s better to give £8 to an unethical company than £80 to an equally unethical company for the same thing, when the price isn’t reflective of the workers’ wages anyway. But yeah, I haven’t researched Levi’s practices yet so I won’t pass judgement yet. I probably should have asked that question to the panel.

Some other posts by ladies there on the night, who had actual cameras not just iPhones:
Fashion Fois Gras
A Pair and a Spare
Zaiba Jabbar
Bang Bang You’re Dead

Worst case of restrictive Title options I’ve seen so far. Shall I be male or married today?! Seen on www.groupon.co.uk

And THEN, trying to sign up to eHarmony and am confronted with the choice – do I want a relationship with a Man or a Woman? Because you can’t choose ‘either’! What am I supposed to do, sign up twice?! Massive fail eHarmony. Seriously – non-homosexual queer people don’t want a relationship?

eHarmony - don't make me choose!

It might be harder work on your algorithms, but if you’re gonna make a dating/relationship site or any site with a personal profile, you seriously need someone with a basic understanding of identity politics to give it the once over. Until they sort this out, I’m boycotting eHarmony on principle.

One of my favourite projects I’ve been working on recently has been the RSPCA Think Pig campaign. I stopped eating meat when I was nine years old after reading about factory farming, and was vegetarian for 12 years (I’ve since failed, and am now pescatarian / attempting-to-be-positive-chooser). After going around ranting at people demanding that they stop eating meat due to the horrors of factory farming for a few years, and losing lots of friends in the process, I eventually realised that some people will always eat meat. So, if you’re going to eat meat, surely you should try and eat meat where the animals have been treated as well as possible?

That’s what Think Pig is about – raising awareness of the different farming methods, labelling on meat, and what they mean for pigs. There’s a great educational video and animation for the campaign, a downloadable shopping guide [PDF], and lots of other information on the Think Pig campaign site. Our contribution at NixonMcInnes was to create a Facebook Game and Facebook Page for the campaign. The game is a word game – pigs being so intelligent and all – where you get bonus points for answering facts about pigs and pig welfare correctly. People can then share these facts on their Facebook Wall, and ‘Like’ the Facebook Page to keep informed about the campaign progress and to discuss the issues around pig farming and pig welfare.

There’s been some lively debate on the Facebook Page about whether it’s helpful to promote higher welfare for pigs being farmed for meat, if you don’t agree with eating pigs in the first place. However, even though I don’t eat them myself, I’d rather people were well informed so they could make an educated choice about what (if any) kind of meat they eat.