Recently, it seems, there have been more articles than usual written about the Baha’i Faith. One from the Huffington Post, is a nice personal opinion about someone who is now investigating the truths about the Baha’i Faith. The article has some very interesting discussion (via comments) at the end of it. It shows several concerns that many people who are or could be investigating the Faith are having.

Another one, from the Wall Street Journal is a brief, but very accurate and current, exploration of the Faith, which contains some of the history of the persecution of the Baha’is, mainly in Iran. The author resides in Haifa, Israel, where the spiritual and administrative centers of the Baha’i Faith are found: the spiritual center because the physical remains of the Bab and Baha’u'llah are kept in Shrines in these properties and the administrative center because the Seat (meeting place) of the Universal House of Justice

Both are very good reads. At this point, I will pause and give you some time to go read them.

…

Reading the collection of blogs found on my favorite RSS reader today, I came accross a cool use of Google Insights for Search (it was new to me, mainly because I didn’t look into it much when it came out). TechCrunch was highlighting the use of this tool to track several Web 2.0 sites/concepts. The maps looked cool so I decided to try a few of my own. Let’s see what insights Google has for the search term: bahai

and

Top Ten Countries (by Search Volume Index)
Iran, Jamaica, Israel, Canada, Kenya, Australia, Bolivia, Panama, New Zealand, Norway

leads me to a few observations:

• Iran and Israel for sure (for reasons mentioned above and more)
• Kenya is a nice surprise (there are clusters in Kenya that are 4% Baha’i by population)
• Australia and Panama both have temples
• Jamaica, Canada, Bolivia, New Zealand, Norway cool!
• Two of the top three countries with largest Baha’i population: US and India didn’t make it, probably due to the normalization. Volume is probably up there, though.

Top Ten Cities (by Search Volume Index)
Vancouver, Chicago, Toronto, Sydney, Seattle, Washington, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Francisco

San Francisco is #10!! Hmm… If you are from San Francisco and you searched because you are investigating, give me a call, or write at least a comment. We’ll meet up with you! :)

All these cities: it makes a lot of sense. They all are part of A clusters, which means many many prayers and energies are being dispensed to allow the message of Baha’u'llah to reach more and more people.

Thanks for revealing this Google!