Although it may come to a shock to some of you, Microsoft has actually put together a cool web application called Keyword Forecast. Using it you can compare up to four keywords and it will spit out some pretty graphs forecasting the impression count vs. time, keyword age distribution, and keyword gender distribution. This is similar to Google Trends but Google’s tool just gave a historical view of keywords and didn’t get into age and gender distributions although it did break it down geographically. Can someone say mashup opportunity here?Very cool for anyone out there like myself who is always looking for new ways to identify not only good keywords but an innovative concept that you’re not sure will still be viable in a few months.

On a whim, I decided to try the tool out with the keywords: ajax, javascript, rails, and php and here’s the output: (as you can see Ajax is expected to sky rocket in the coming months)

Here’s the time vs. impression count graph:

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