Novel ways to measure economic activity

Following on from class discussions in weeks 3 and 4 on GDP measurement, here's an interesting post at FT Alphaville (highly recommended reading generally) on Gangster Economics - the point essentially is trying to measure the state of the economy via non-standard means - so not GDP or unemployment, but instead making use of the vast amounts of data out there online about the economy such as Google searches for pickup trucks, used cars, and even guns!

If you're not acquainted, Google Trends is a fantastic resource, enabling you to get information for how often a term is searched for on Google. You can search for multiple terms too, and hence you could search for just how often people search for Labour over Tory, and restrict it to the UK, or how often people are searching for the current Republican candidates in the US, if you're politically inclined, or sporting wise you can check how often folk search for your favourite team vs your rivals...