The fact is NEW ideas, events, trends, people, etc come into contact with us everyday. Whether it is a newsworthy event on network TV, a new bill on capital hill, crazy new relgions, something happening with a celebrity or a weather phenomenon somewhere in world. New ideas and things happen everyday. What is the best way to spot them in basically real time? Well look at Google overall search logs every few minutes of course.

So you don’t have access to Google search logs? Either do I, but we do have is Google Hot Trends and more importantly Google Hot Trends RSS feed:

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/atom/hourly

So how does this work? Well depending on how involved you want to get or how much content you need it is pretty simple.

You can either:

1. Visit the Google Trends website every once in a while for ideas: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends. The seem to update this page every 45-60 minutes with the hottest trends.

2. Or you can get a more historical look with the RSS feed through your feed reader: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/atom/hourly. Google will ping your reader every 45-60 minutes with the latest trends and then you can go back through (when you have time) and sort through all the hottest searches for the day/week. I find this the best way to spot really active topics that I would like to write about.

For example a few of the top queries today are:

1. 10th amendment

2. what’s the difference between peanut butter and jam?

Sure sometimes they are informative and sometimes funny, but either way these trends will get your creative brain headed in the right direction and away from writers block island.

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