In the past year, on USENET, were you a cheesehead who had to rave about your team’s big win, an avid follower of world news, or a pop culture junkie whose newsgroup posts revolved around royal weddings and celebrity train wrecks?
If any of those rang a bell, you’re in company with others who posted about similar events.
Amongst the most popular posts on the web this past year you probably saw major events interspersed amid anecdotes about their kids, and at the top of the 2011 global topics were the death of Osama bin Laden, the Green Bay Packers Super Bowl victory and the Casey Anthony verdict.
Facebook culled the status updates of its 750 million-plus members and created a “Memology 2011” that they explain as taking “the pulse of this global community by comparing this year’s status updates to last year’s, unearthing the most popular topics and cultural trends — or memes — emerging on Facebook. Whether it’s hmu, lms or tbh, each year brings a new set of three letter acronyms that go viral.”
Here are the biggest topics posted on USENET and on Facebook status updates over the past year: the ever “winning” Charlie Sheen, the death of Steve Jobs, the royal nuptials of William and Kate, Amy Winehouse’s early exit from this world, the videogame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Libya military ops and Hurricane Irene.
As for memes, the hands-down winner in 2011, at least on Facebook, was planking.
And as for those three letter acronyms, the top 2011 ones were “lms” (like my status) and “tbh” (to be honest), with “the most iconic status update” for the year was a mash-up of the two: “lms for a tbh.”
