United online
Robin Goad, the UK research director Internet traffic counter Hitwise has been blogging up a storm in the past few days. He's been looking at: searches around the Labour leadership election, who is the biggest Twitter celebrity and which is the UK's top digital city.
Goad says popular opinion was reflected through online searches in the run-in to the labour leadership election, and infers that Ed Miliband's greater popularity is illustrated by him getting double the number of searches containing the keyword ‘miliband' than his older, and ultimately vanquished brother.
There is another theory that could apply, however. David was a prominent member of the shadow cabinet while Labour were in power, while Ed was just his owlish little bro. Yes, it made for some easy stories for the political hacks when Ed joined the race, but David was still considered the heir apparent. So when it looked possible that Miliband junior might actually win, there will have been a rush of Googling from people trying to find out who the hell he actually is.
The study also revealed that Guido Fawkes remains by far the most visited political blogger, and that the official Conservative blog is a lot more popular than its Labour equivalent, with Fawkes himself responsible for discrediting the Labour blogging scene.
The most popular Twitter celebrity is apparently not Stephen Fry or Ashton Kutcher, but Kim Kardashian. Who? For those who had never heard of her, and that includes your correspondent, she's one of those ‘famous for being famous' people, like Paris Hilton. She doesn't seem to do much but isn't bad looking and, inevitably, was afforded her fame by a ‘leaked' tape of her having sex.
She has nearly five million twitter followers, and such is her success on Twitter that her website gets nearly as many visitors from Twitter as it does Google. The table below shows the top 20 websites, categorised as ‘entertainment' by Hitwise, to get UK Twitter traffic in August.
Lastly, Hitwise measures how web savvy different UK regions are by working out the percentage of total website visits per head in each postcode. The resulting index indicates which regions surf the most and the clear winner was Canterbury in Kent. By looking at those sites that get the greatest proportion of their traffic from Canterbury, Goad was able to conclude they're quite into online gaming. They also clearly have good taste in football teams.
