Inspired by a graph from DIAGRAM and an old meme, I decided to take a look and see if the internet could help me figure out what is the new what. Variations on this is the new that are fairly common on the web; using Alexa's Web Search Service to search for the phrase "* is the new *" turned up several million instances of documents that are on hand in our archive. Unlike other search services, Million Search Results returns to up to 10 million hits, which makes it useful for data-mining.
For less than $100, I was able to find, extract, and aggregate pairs of words with an "is the new" relationship. It turns out that, as of this post, the most common pair happened to be "pink is the new blog" but there are some other interesting relationships in the data, which are easily plotted with GraphViz. Since the meme started with colors, so did I.
As you can see, black is, apparently, the new black. The graph should be read such that purple is the new blue, which is also the new black. Darker arrows indicate a stronger relationship, so green is the new red more than red is the new green, both of which are the new black. In fact, according to our data, black has a monopoly on being so last year. So what does the internet have to say about other domains?
Taking the question literally, I took a look at the companies behind the sites in our Top 10 list, plus the word "internet," adding other companies to fill out the graph. As an example, even though it isn't in the Top 10, a lot of things are the new AOL. In order of rank, Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, and Facebook are all the new internet. As above, the thicker arrows indicate stronger relationships in the data; so, Facebook is the new MySpace, which is the new Friendster, which is only sort of the new Facebook.What features jump out at you?
