Five things worth sharing from the last week (or so), brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Katie.
1. Who partied the hardest on NYE?
Uber, a mobile app that connects you with a taxi, private car or lift-share in a number of cities around the world, have used data collected from their users to work out which city partied the hardest when welcoming in 2015. San Francisco peaked the earliest with most party goers heading home around 1am, while most Parisians stayed out until 4am. You can find out where other big cities placed on the Uber blog.
Jawbone, a company who produce wearable technology which tracks users activity, also published information about how late people partied ’til on NYE with this interactive world map. Compiled from stats taken from thousands of their UP wristband users who track their sleep using the tech, the information revealed that the last city to bed was Moscow at 3:43am, while 30% of users in the US were asleep by midnight.
2. 2014 Wikipedia’s most edited articles
Over the NY Wikipedia released their list of the most edited English language articles of 2014. As usual, we are obsessed with celebrity death and conspiracy theories, with ‘deaths in 2014’ (19,789 edits) and ‘Malaysia Airlines flight 370’ (10,217 edits) the top two entries. Social scientist and research associate Brian Keegan also published some Wikipedia stats too. His analysis revealed that on the Arabic Wikipedia Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid were the most edited pages, whilst Spanish cared most about editing the FIFA 2014 World Cup entry and the Czech and German speaking populations both edited the article the war in Donbass the most times.
Over all in 2014 more than three million pages were created and more than 100 million edits were made in all languages. Wikipedia cemented their position of being one of the most significant and essential websites of today by revealing that their content was viewed around 250 billion times by nearly half a billion visitors worldwide.
3. #JeSuisCharlie
On Wednesday France suffered from its deadliest terror attack in two decades when masked gunmen stormed the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and killed twelve people, critically injuring another eleven before escaping. The world expressed solidarity for the people of France as #JeSuisCharlie began trending on Twitter worldwide shortly after the shooting. Five hours after the attack the hashtag had been used more than 250,000 times.
The Archbishop of Canterbury was among those who tweeted, while the US embassy in France changed its official Twitter profile image to the #JeSuisCharlie logo. Google France also paid tribute by posting an image of a black ribbon below the search box. Aside from Twitter, the hashtag was also shared by more than 10,000 people on Instagram and a Facebook group called ‘Je Suis Charlie’ had more than 80,000 ‘members’ within hours of being set up.
4. Facebook Copyright Hoax
You might have seen a few of these pop up in your news feed over the last week – the message about Facebook infringing your privacy rights, telling you that you can protect your creative content by posting the message to your wall. How this would stop Facebook using your videos, pictures and whatever else you have posted on there is baffling, but it would appear that lots of people have not thought this through…
The terms and conditions for Facebook state that the user owns all of the content and information posted on Facebook, and can control how it is shared via the privacy and application settings. But Facebook does have a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook”. If you want out of this agreement then just close your account – the terms and conditions also state that you release this permission when you close your account. Unless the content has already been shared with other users – then you’ve basically sold your soul..
5. Some people should not be allowed to use Twitter
Lastly, two Twitter stories which illustrate why use of the social network perhaps shouldn’t be available to all…
Firstly, Katie Hopkins tweeted some classic Katie Hopkins style comments over the NY about the Glaswegian nurse who contracted ebola. After there were hundreds of complaints about her tweets, Scottish Police confirmed they were investigating posts made by Hopkins. Then on Tuesday this week Calvin Klein revealed its new adverts starring model Lara Stone and Justin Bieber. His teenage (assumed by the amount of emojis used in the tweets) fans did not like seeing him caressed by another woman and have since made a lot of death threats towards Stone.
There were around 20,000 adults and 2,000 children investigated in the past three years for online comments and social media messages. The CPS even issued guidelines last year to help identify what sort of online behaviour should warrant criminal proceedings – advising police to look for for messages that constituted a ‘credible threat of violence to the person or damage to property’. Whether they are credible or not, it cannot be pleasant to receive abusive tweets and it would be nice to see 2015 as the year Twitter trolls get some comeuppance.