Series of Fun Facts: Part lll

It was snowing this morning! Did you see that?  Outside everything is dedicated to Christmas – the lights, the shops, the markets and now even a little bit of snow. So I decided not to do anything related to Christmas, but pull together fun stuff that is going on in the World Wide Web.

This time I wanted to look at the things that are really popular at the moment in the Twitter environment, when people are trying to have fun:

• 9GAG is a comedy website set in Hong Kong and hosted in the United Stated. It launched in 2008 and currently is very popular amongst people. A lot of people are sharing the images they find in 9GAG via Twitter. The site is best known for recurring use of internet memes. It is among the 500 most visited websites ranking 468 place globally. According to alexa.com the sites users tend to be under the age of 35 and they tend to be childless. Visitors to this site spend approximately 64 seconds on each pageview and a total of 13 minutes on the site during each visit. I must admit it is pretty addictive sometimes.
• What internet memes do you pass over? I personally use hashtags at the moment, although I’m keeping my options open. So internet memes are basically a concept that spreads via the internet. While doing this research, I found out that the earliest usage of meme in general is in the book created by Richard Dawkins called “The Selfish Gene” – it was published in 1976. Internet meme is an idea that is propagated and spreads through the internet. A meme can be a hyperlink, video, picture, website, hashtag or just a word or phrase. One of the most popular internet memes are misspellings, such as the word “more” as “moar” or “the” as “teh” simply because misspelling is very common. Internet memes spread from person to person through various places like blogs, news sources and social networks, so no wonder Twitter is full with them. Academically, researchers model how the memes evolve and predict which memes will survive and spread throughout the Web, while commercially they are used in viral marketing where they are an inexpensive form of mass advertising.
• Rage comic is an extremely popular internet meme at the moment. It is a comic made from a stock set characters, commonly known as rage faces and centre on the rage guy. It started on 4chan in 2008 and in 2009 the meme experienced an upsurge in popularity. In 2010 shirts with the rage face started to appear and were sold by Hot Topic. The comic usually focus on small moments in daily life from the perspective of a protagonist the reader can identify with. The face seems a bit creepy to me, though.
  

• And a little discovery for the ending. The most popular Twitter hashtags in 2011 were:

1. #egypt
2. #tigerblood
3. #threewordstoliveby
4. #idontunderstandwhy
5. #japan
6. #improudtosay
7. #superbowl