Popular Elsewhere
15:04 UK time, Thursday, 13 October 2011
A look at the stories ranking highly on various news sites.
OK, so celebrity sells. But looking more closely at the , it may be the captions rather than the photos that are attracting readers. That's because the caption writer appears to have gone off message and decided to give the glitterati the most unlikely of political causes:
"Yes, stars came out in force last week to show their support for the brave little people taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests across America. Here, actress Sofia Vergara demands higher taxes for the wealthy as she arrives at the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic in Los Angeles on Sunday."
Alas, the New York Times' most viewed article on what it calls "The Big Disruption" is not referring to the Globe and Mail's mischief making. Instead it as well. Such a big task may explain why its title "something's happening here" doesn't give much away. Not much like when readers were encouraged to get into Team Katie and Team Peter after the separation of glamour model Katie Price and singer Peter Andre, Thomas Friedman is asking readers to decide whether they are in Team Big Disruption (the protests show growth obsessed capitalism is reaching its end) or Team Big Shift (we're in a middle of a change towards new technologies). OK so, really not much like Team Katie and Team Peter.
It really can be the smallest of things that can get readers clicking onto an article, as the Daily Mail's popular story proves. An pointed out why he gets in a lather (geddit) about shower gel. The article does give a nod to Parris's complaints of waste shower gel creates compared to soap. But the Daily Mail goes on to argue that shower gel is only around because of the "persuasive power of marketing". That, and our liking for smelling of sweet foods.
Discover's most read article finds - and write a book about it. He used surprisingly old techniques to remember sequences of numbers. The premise is that your visual memory is better than memory for lists or numbers. So you create a "memory palace" in your mind which pictures these numbers as absurd images. This didn't cut it in the international competition though - he managed to memorise nine and a half decks of cards in an hour but it wasn't anywhere near enough to get the grandmaster title.
