October 29, 2010
Sometimes it seems like girls rule (or grrrls rulez?) Twitter, given how dominant boy bands and female-skewing TV shows like "Glee" are on the microblogging service. But this week, boy culture dominated not only our Top 10 -- tweets about male-dominated sports basically took over the Twittersphere -- but lower-ranking Trending Topics as well, from a certain repeat train-wreck sitcom star (see: "Charlie Sheen Found Drunk, Naked in NYC Hotel") to "Dark Knight" (Twitterheads got all excited that franchise auteur Christopher Nolan has announced the title of the third installment of the Batman trilogy: "The Dark Night Rises").
October 22, 2010
Last week a story in the U.K.'s Telegraph caught my eye: Manchester police uses Twitter to detail inanity of 999 calls. (The 999 system is similar to 911 in the U.S.) As the paper reported, the Greater Manchester Police department took to Twitter to "demonstrate that most of their time is spent on 'social work.'"
October 15, 2010
Sometimes it's a bit of a judgment call deciding what belongs on this chart -- i.e., what constitutes a "brand." But it's sort of a no-brainer that the 33 miners rescued from a Chilean mine this week have effectively become, at least collectively, a mini-entertainment conglomerate. The more than 1,000 journalists from around the world who covered the rescue operation were trafficking in, basically, infotainment: something akin to a big Hollywood blockbuster crossed with reality TV. And chances are a good number of the miners will rake in some pretty decent scratch as they capitalize on their unlikely fame (check out this Reuters report: "Chile's rescued miners recover, offers pour in").
October 01, 2010
Twitterers have been all atwitter about the continuing rollout of Twitter's redesign, aka #newtwitter, making the top topic on Twitter this week ... Twitter. (Tweet!)
September 24, 2010
Tweets about European soccer (football) teams, players and matches actually collectively overshadowed NFL-related tweets this week -- yet more evidence of Twitter's growing global footprint.
September 17, 2010
Sports brands dominate our list this week, with three of the seven spots going to, basically, balls in flight. The NFL and European soccer (football) loomed large, while the U.S. Open became a global Twitter obsession as well with a lot of help from Spanish tennis superstar Rafael Nadal.
September 10, 2010
This week fully one-fifth of our Top 10 traces directly back to Disney Channel: Disney star Selena Gomez charted because she and her band debuted her new music video for "A Year Without Rain" on the cable channel, and fans of the Disney Channel original movie "Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam," starring Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers, went coo-coo crazy for it on Twitter.
August 27, 2010
Until recently, conventional wisdom has been that American pop culture is so unstoppable/inevitable/irresistible that it suffocates other cultures around the world. (In fact, countries including France passed cultural-import laws specifically to keep American pop culture at bay.) Some weeks that still seems to be the case, but more and more the pop-cultural heat, and general topical heat, on Twitter can be found far beyond U.S. borders.
August 20, 2010
"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" takes the top spot in our chart this week -- a bitter irony for the sci-fi action comedy that opened last Friday. Based on a popular graphic novel series, the Michael Cera vehicle got some glowing notices from critics.
August 13, 2010
Finally! After four weeks in our top spot, "Inception" has been deposed -- by the Teen Choice Awards. For the purposes of this chart, we consolidate related trends, and the biggest subtrend to come out of the TCA's was "Taylor Hotner" -- a play on the name of Taylor Lautner, one of the stars of the "Twilight" franchise.
July 30, 2010
Last week I published this: "How 'Inception' Became the New World Cup (and/or Justin Bieber)." But guess what? Bieber himself is back, baby!
July 23, 2010
More and more, it seems that a sure-fire way to become a top-trending personality on Twitter is to trash and/or get trashed. Consider Shirley Sherrod, the former USDA official, who was briefly (and wrongly) maligned as a racist on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com blog. Or, bizarrely, Felipe Neto, a Brazilian video-blogger who pissed off "Twi-heads" (he'd mocked the "Twilight" vampire franchise and its fans in an extended comedic screed viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube).
July 16, 2010
Sort of a sad chart this week, in multiple ways: George Steinbrenner got a massive send-off from the Twittersphere, as did the World Cup. What will people tweet about instead of soccer? "Inception," I guess. And Paul the Octopus -- who correctly predicted the winner of the World Cup -- will surely fade from Twitter view, too, given that he's retired.
July 09, 2010
The top breakout stars of the World Cup -- Mick Jagger, Paul the Octopus and Cristiano Ronaldo -- gathered so much momentum on their own that the folks at What the Trend decided to track them individually rather then roll them into the World Cup uber-trend.
June 25, 2010
No surprise: the World Cup takes our No. 1 spot again this week. (Justin Bieber, the former King of Twitter, should maybe think about taking up soccer.)
June 04, 2010
In this week's Top 10 Most Tweeted Brands chart, there are three major signs of globalization: South Korean boy band Super Junior, tweets about European soccer and the prominent presence of the Eurovision Song Contest.
May 21, 2010
A funny thing happened on the way to this week's Top 10 Most Tweeted Brands chart, a collaboration between Advertising Age and What the Trend: Someone named Bustin Jieber started to trend on Twitter. Which freaked me out a bit, because in preparing the April 26th edition of this charticle, I just couldn't bring myself to type the words "Justin" and "Bieber" one more time, so I joked that among that week's top Twitter topics was "some kid named Bustin Jieber -- or something like that."
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