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If you haven't discovered Google Trends yet, you're missing out on some of the Web's most interesting data and information. At any point you can see what searches are trending on Google and can use this data to compare the popularity of trends over time with nifty graphs. It's fun to play around with - but wouldn't it be nice if someone spoon-fed you the popular trends, explaining them each week in a short-form video podcast format? Luckily this is precisely what Google will now be doing with a new weekly video series called Google Beat.

Lifehacker's founding editor Gina Trapani has just announced that she's joining Expert Labs, the government-oriented independent think tank led by Anil Dash and funded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her first project: deploying her Twitter-based decision making software called ThinkTank for the White House.

The Obama administration announced the joint project with Expert Labs in a blog post earlier this month. As Trapani described it today: "The President has identified a series of scientific and technical challenges that are as important to the future as the moon landing was. And we want to help drive feedback on that list, and even suggest what other items should be on there that haven't been included."

Six months after announcing her decision to step down from four years of daily responsibilities at productivity mega-blog Lifehacker, Gina Trapani will announce today that she is joining San Diego based Pelotonics to advise the company on both product development and marketing. Trapani's trusted voice has reviewed thousands of websites, services and workflows that aim to help people get more done online - so her decision to join a company in that market is one of the strongest endorsements we can imagine.

Pelotonics describes itself as a group collaboration system built with "an eye toward adding certain intuitive pieces of functionality that Basecamp did not and would not launch." We wrote about the company once before, when it integrated popular note taking service Evernote into its software.

Lifehacker founder and former lead editor Gina Trapani announced this morning that she's started a new blog called Smarterware.org. She says the new site has "no ads, no digg badges, lots of sentences starting with 'I'." It won't have dozens of posts daily under a rigorous publishing schedule - it will be a place for "stuff that fired off a synapse or two in my head," Trapani says.

After four years leading what's become the most widely read productivity blog and one of the biggest blogs period on the web, Trapani announced at the start of the year that she was leaving her position as Lifehacker lead editor. She posted a long goodbye and look back at the site's history two weeks later. Trapani has been one of the most important figures in the rise of the blogging medium. She's also one hell of a nice person.