The Net gets sillier by the minute. Was Dave Winer floating the idea of RSS churches when he pointedly remarked that Jesus is only marginally more popular than RSS — a project he is alleged to have had some hand in?

Where did he extract this juicy bit of info from? Why, Google Trends, of course, a newly released offshoot of its Zeitgeist program.

It’s a shame to spoil a great story, but Google search is dominated by techie types — a bit like Dave really — so what would you expect? Be careful Dave, or Dan Brown will be asking for an interview.

In the spirit of open inquiry I decided to test out this trendy new service. The problem is you need to pick topics with masses of searches to even register a tick. Neither “Syntagma Media”, nor “b5media” made the cut. Nor did any other terms I was particularly interested in.

Steve Rubel comments: “Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google searches to compute how many searches have been done for certain terms relative to the sum total. It includes a news-volume graph too that shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories. Unfortunately, unlike Google Finance it does not include blogs. This is a lost opportunity given Google’s interest in furthering peer-to-peer media.”

Sorry Googlers, this is definitely more geist than zeitgeist.