lolz vs. lulz: regionalism in emergent online culture

Instead of grading papers, I've been procrastinating some more at my favorite time-suck site, Google Trends.

As usual, a little casual searching turned up something interesting: "global village" rhetoric aside, there seems to be some regionalism in the growth of emerging online subcultures. Specifically, I searched for variant spellings related to the "lulz" phenomenon.

Turns out that the more popular "lulz" spelling variant holds exclusive dominance in the Midwest, Southeast and Northwest states such as Michigan, Washington and Georgia. The "lolz" variant has more traction in the Northeast and rural/suburban California, gaining parity with "lulz" in New York City (w00t!). Strangely, urban California is just as lulz-centric as the Midwest and Southeast.

Not sure what this means. Broadly, of course, spelling variants are kind of a marker for information flows; people who game, chat and email with each other, and who read and watch and play the same mass media, are more likely to adopt similar spelling habits for an emerging lexicon.

It might be interesting to correlate these trends with other, macrosocial trends (voting habits? eating habits?)