Take Al Gore, Gore Vidal, or Vidal Sassoon. Would any of these gentlemen have turned as successful had their parents picked less recognizable names for them?

Likely. After all, how do you explain the success and phenomenon around someone named Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gisele Bundchen?

Clearly, it’s not about one’s given name, but how you manage to *live*it: fill it with life, meaning and gestalt. To put it into today’s social media speak, it’s about how you create the brand of you!

But what happens if social media turns into the new go-to engine for parents eager to hone in on the ultimate name for their kid? What happens if the über-popular engagement platform begins to not just promote but indeed shape parents’ decisions on what to name their kids?

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I have been traveling for nearly seven weeks now, on a tight and tough schedule.

Started my journey in Thailand in Bangkok . Made my way to Cambodia (Sihanoukville, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap), Hong Kong, Shanghai, Borneo Island , Malaysia, and now I am writing from Boracay Island in the Philippines.  A lovely, maybe a little too commercialized spot (they even have a Starbucks on the waterfront), but with a stunning beach. (Just awarded the #2 best beach worldwide on Tripadvisor).

All in, I intentionally wanted to get away from the Interweb and being online all the time.  But it wasn’t meant to be – at least not while in Asia .

Welcome to the world of Wifi, smartphones and Facebook supreme!

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We’ve recently written about National Teacher Appreciation Day in the US – in many other parts of the world, though, the big holiday of the month is May 1st, or ‘May Day‘ (aka Labor Day).

In the US, Labor Day happens in early September and is primarily about getting that one last long weekend in before the unofficial end of summer.  Elsewhere in the world, though, the concept of ‘Labor Day’ is a bit more politicized: also known as International Worker’s Day, the holiday has had a particularly rich history here in Berlin dating all the way back to the bad old GDR days (the still grandiose Karl Marx Allee boulevard was in fact built for the sole purpose of providing as impressive a backdrop as possible for the yearly parade).

As Berlin has gradually became more westernized in the years after the fall of the wall, the holiday has evolved into more of a day of protest – in fact, just last year, 10,000 protestors clashed with police on the streets.

With May Day all over the local news here for a couple of days last week, I thought it might be interesting to see whether the same was true out there on the internet as well: was May Day (or, rather, Tag der Arbeit) a ‘trending topic’ online over the weekend?

The fastest/easiest/best/cheapest (i.e. free) way to graph the frequency with which a given keyword or phrase is searched for on Google within a specified time window is Google Insights. (Google Trends, another Google site, offers much the same service – but the date and geographic region filtering is less powerful) .

Here’s what Google Trends shows for ‘Tag der Arbeit’ over the past few years:

A few things to note:  if Google’s data is correct, there was roughly 5 times the amount of interest in ‘Tag der Arbeit’ this year than in either of the previous two years (vertical values are scaled such that the number “100″ represents the maximum value returned, much as Google’s financial charts are scaled).   That’s a little hard to accept, and begs the question of whether what we’re looking at is being affected by some differences in Google’s methodology over the past few years.  Secondly, thanks to the site’s geographic functionality, it would appear that the German states of Nordrhein-Westfalen and Hessen are for more interested in ‘Tag der Arbeit’ than we are in Berlin – although, again, this assumes a normalized data  methodology across the whole of Germany.

Google Insights is a very useful service.  It understands the Google search operators (‘OR’, ‘+’, etc.), and it’s possible to compare (overlay) multiple results by keyword/phrase, location, or time span – which can lead to some pretty interesting graphs.  However, as noted above (and as is always the case), any results are only as good as the underlying data – in computer science/IT vernacular, it’s the ‘garbage in, garbage out‘ effect.

In any event, I’m happy to report ‘Tag der Arbiet’ 2011 was largely violence- and vandalism-free here in Berlin.

PS The Saturday before May 1, I read about a protest parade coming through my Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, so I decided to check it out (and as one of the area’s invading gentrifiers, to film it with my iPhone).  As protest marches go, it was relatively cozy neighborhood event:

…evidently der Polizei had heard about it too, and after last year’s troubles, they were not taking any chances – so immediately on the heels of the protest parade came the ‘Polizei parade’…

I’ve got a full work plate this morning, and my own set of feelings to process about the news of Osama bin Laden’s death (more on that will likely appear on my Tumblr later tonight), but wanted to get down a couple noteworthy bullets. If I have time, I’ll return and flesh these out into a coherent piece.

We all know that social media get the word out at lightning speed–but what struck me most about this news was not the speed of information, but the immediacy of community development. People are using Twitter and Facebook to work out what are, for many, complicated emotions. Relief, joy, anger, sadness are all appearing at once. This is in stark contrast to what we often see in traditional media soundbites (particularly video media), where broad strokes are painted when it comes to emotional content–i.e., those people are cheering, those people over there are not. Social media is creating a space where it’s acceptable, and useful, to express multiple feelings. This is also very different than, for example, the days following 9/11–when the war on Afghanistan was announced, it was largely extremely taboo in American public squares (online or off) to express concern, or disagreement. Part of that was the political climate, but part of that was that there weren’t necessary effective public spaces for people to be nuanced human beings.

I’m also struck by the speed with humor was employed as a tactic to process the news. Again, in contrast to 9/11, when we waited two weeks for the new issue of The Onion to come out–no one made any jokes before then. Not only was it taboo, but there just wasn’t a way to deal. (By the way, that issue of The Onion might be the best one ever–headlines like, “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule, “Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves in Hell,” and many more gems.) Last night, some of the immediate jokes, some in good taste, some not, clearly paved a way for people to express all kinds of reactions to this global news phenomenon. My personal favorites were @marcfaletti‘s “It was that f***ing iPad location history, wasn’t it?” and the newly created @OsamaInHell account tweeting, “Wait, what?”

More as time allows today…