There is no better way of seeing into the New Year than watching this classic movie followed by a thorough “auditing” of the year passed.

The dominant Internet search engine Google provided a glimpse of what's been on our collective consciousness and thus reflected in search queries during the last year.

Elegant graphs show levels of on-line interest in the most significant events that shook the US pop culture in 2007 – death of Anna Nicole Smith, Virginia Tech massacre, leaking of private nude photos of teen pop star and TV series actress Vanessa Hudgens, and the death of Luciano Pavarotti.

The nature of man has not changed in 2007 and is the same both at the other end of the world and also in Latvia;this can be clearly seen when looking at Latvian magazines at every newsstand or petrol station. The horrifying and sensitive topics get the most attention.

No wonder, Google has introduced a separate top for deceased people (or gossip surrounding them), because it is clear that the most efficient way of strengthening popularity is death or rumours of death;when Pavarotti died early last October he was twice as popular as Radiohead who had just released their new album.

However, this is nothing new, as already for a hundred years or so it has been clear that all motives can be reduced to the procreative drive or to the fear of death.

It is much more interesting to see the “fastest rising and fastest falling” globally (!). Online buying or downloading of music (“mp3”, “kazaa”) are not the hottest searches any more as this is an area that has been already mastered - some purchase it online, some download it using ways that have not yet been clamped down by the big record companies and copyright agencies. On the other hand, on-line social networking has flourished and become very popular - 7 out of 10 “risers” are portals that offer various opportunities of virtual contacts.

Interestingly, how successful will these networking portals (MySpace, Facebook, as well as draugiem.lv and one.lv) be in turning this social capital into financial capital the next year? Will we, developers of brands and communications, succeed in creating sufficiently exciting, entertaining and useful ideas to be invited to / viewed by a circle of friends?

P.S. By the way, Yahoo also provides its view which shows a slightly different picture as it categorised in different groups.