As the nation’s unemployment rate continues to climb, it seems the newly jobless are increasingly filing and managing their unemployment online.

Traffic to state unemployment claims filing domains has, not surprisingly, jumped drastically over the past year in areas hardest hit by the recession.  Markets affected most by the real estate implosion, such as California and Arizona (eapply4ui.edd.ca.gov & egov.azdes.gov ), as well as those facing down the automotive meltdown, such as Ohio and Michigan ( unemployment.ohio.gov & bwuc-claims.state.mi.us ), are seeing UVs to their claims gateways explode.

While traffic to those claims filing sites alone is certainly not evidence of conversion (actually filing a claim), the trends post-September 2008 are clearly apparent.  Additionally, Unique Visitor trends to sites of populous states, like California’s eapply4ui.edd.ca.gov, are clearly behaving as leading indicators of trends to job search sites like Monster.com; patterns of traffic to California’s site appear to lag Monster by about a month or two.

I stumbled upon a new site last month, rockyou.com, while I was perusing the top sites for attention every month. Just in case anyone was confused on what exactly that attention metric we talk about is; let’s use Facebook as an example. In June facebook.com accounted for 6.55% of all seconds spent for every single person online across the entire US! That means for every 2 minutes spent in cyber land, 13 of those seconds were spent online stalking old colleagues on Facebook. Well, rockyou.com is not quite as prevalent but at rank 39 it still accounted for over .1% of all time spent online in April.

So that’s what got this site on my radar which has been operational since mid 2006 and was closely involved with making widgets for Myspace and is the most prevalent widget maker (in terms of downloads) for Facebook since December 2007. (I don’t know what I would do without Wikipedia). Well since then they have teamed up with a bunch of the big time social networks and increased the site traffic year-over-year from 5 million unique visitors in April ’08 to almost 29 million in April ’09, over 5x!

I’m sure there are a ton of great widgets that you can use to pimp up your profile and continue to push Facebook attention off the charts but the hot new offering is their “Best Slideshow Ever!” app. In the name of responsible journalism and morbid curiosity, it was my duty to try out the tool. After careful examination I was pleasantly surprised with the results. As always, our readers have the final say on whether or not it can produce The Best Slideshow Ever but for my test show I think it did the trick. Let us know what you think of RockYou.com.

Negotiations between the Boston Globe and the unions over cost-cutting have come to a successful conclusion, and it seems that the Globe will continue publishing. This is just one of many major newspapers to struggle recently, and yet another sign that traditional channels are losing ground to the internet.

While the newspaper isn’t as widely circulated as it once was, the Boston Globe name still holds some weight and readers are seeking it out in different form.

Boston.com hosts the online version of the Boston Globe as well as content from other sources, including job search powered by Monster and car search powered by Cars.com. Six of the top ten terms driving traffic to Boston.com included mention of the Globe. The site had nearly five and a half million unique visitors last month, which is up 74% from March of last year and 120% from two years ago.

The physical version of the paper is going through tough times, but demand for the reporting remains high. Hopefully this agreement between the paper and the unions marks the beginnings of finding a solution so that readers can continue to get their news in whatever form they please.

Swine flu may not have officially reached pandemic levels yet, but the hype certainly has. It seems to be the headline in every publication and I can hardly have a conversation about anything without swine flu creeping in. And people have been turning to the web for the latest information from a variety of sources.

Search destinations for ’swine flu’ span several different categories, from major news sites to social networks. Searchers are doing their historical research too - CapitalCentury.com has seen a spike in interest due to an article about the 1976 outbreak of swine flu. Official government channels are the destination of choice for the updates on the outbreak though, with cdc.gov receiving one third of all search referrals for the term.

With information and speculation about swine flu coming from all over, it’s good to see that people are looking to the CDC most often to get the official word. I just hope that the chart of confirmed swine flu cases doesn’t look like this in a couple weeks.

For the past few years, I have not only been a Sirius Satellite Radio subscriber, but also one of its biggest fans. Sirius replaced the unmanageable amount of mix CD’s that littered my car and put all the music and entertainment in one small piece of equipment. Sirius has also changed the way I listen to music at work. On in the background all day, Sirius Internet Radio provides me with the soundtrack to my daily life. While some days call for an upbeat tempo with Sirius Hits 1 and some days require a more mellow choice like Cinemagic, my channel of choice is Howard 100. And who can blame me - the home of chaotic entertainment that is amusing day after day, providing everything from the ‘Wack Pack’ to Robin’s News. I wanted to know if others shared in my loyalty to Howard 100 when listening to Sirius Internet Radio, and if not, what are the subscribers listening to?

To do this, I looked at the population of Sirius Internet Radio listeners and then analyzed what channels they are tuning into during a month. Keep in mind that one listener can fall into multiple buckets throughout the month. Here’s what I found:

• Howard is King: 28.4% and 16.1% of Sirius Internet Listeners tune in to Howard 100 and Howard 101, respectively. Just like in his days of old on terrestrial radio, Howard Stern continues to be the most listened to channel.
• Rock and Pop lead in the music categories: Sirius Hits 1 commands the top music channel with 10% of Listeners heading to this channel. However, while people are tuning in to hear the latest pop hits, just as many people are tuning in to listen to the two classic rock channels (Classic Rewind and Classic Vinyl).
• While not on the list here, Sirius NFL Radio does break into the Top 10 listened to channels during the NFL season. 9.3% of Sirius Internet Unique Listeners listened to Sirius NFL Radio in September ‘08. This was #4 overall!
• Online listeners love their caroling: Sirius XM Pops and Cinemagic, two channel dedicated to Holiday music, were in the Top 10 listened to channels in December ‘08. Cinemagic was the 2nd most listened to channel in December ‘08 with 14.2% of Sirius Internet Listeners listening to Holiday music. The top channel was still Howard 100.

With a large percentage of listeners tuning into Howard 100 and Howard 101 on SIRIUS Internet Radio, what will happen to Sirius XM Radio if Stern were to leave at the end of his contract in 2010? Howard Stern commands a large audience, many of which might cancel their service if Stern were to leave at the end of his contract. As Internet Radio continues to grow, Stern’s next move could be to bring his own channel to the World Wide Web. I can see it now, the Stern Internet Radio iPhone app being the biggest app of 2011.

I long-ago ditched the bulky paper versions of my dictionary and thesaurus in favor of the easier to use (and lighter) dictionary.com. Years of English and Writing classes have forced the habit of underlining unfamiliar words I come across and looking them up later. During a recent trip to the site I wondered; Do other people know what this word means? What is everyone else looking up?

• My junior high English teacher would be horrified to see this list – with terms like alliteration and metaphor ranking high on the list, it looks like many people weren’t paying attention in class. The 25-34 demographic seems to be in most need of a refresher course, with nearly 29% of dictionary.com visitors falling in that group.
• I’m guessing that a lot of Valentine’s Day cards included the message, “The dictionary defines love as…” with the term jumping up to number eight in February. But that isn’t as high as it was in December – were people checking to see if it was the real thing before making their holiday present purchases?
• More than anything else, users are clicking on the Search button without entering a term, which brings up results for the definition of “search.”

The list of most looked-up words can show us trends deeper than what the latest vocabulary refresher was though - the most popular term in October and November was “socialism.”