Interesting Facts

The first video ever posted on YouTube was called "Me At The Zoo". So far the video has had 19,690,215 views, with 226,191 Thumbs Up clicks, and 11,794 Thumbs Down clicks. FYI - The first ever comment on YouTube was probably "interesting..." and it was posted by COBALTGRUV.  I'm not sure how it was worked out, but it's interesting anyway.

The YouTube video Gangnam Style has forced YouTube to upgrade their viewing statistics to handle 64 bit numbers. (The number of views for the video steadily increased since its release in 2012, until it hit a critical 2,147,483,647. Why critical? Well, the largest number that can be represented by a 32-bit integer is 2,147,483,647. As a result, YouTube have upgraded their view counter to handle 64 bit integers, which means that they can sit back and relax, unless the video clocks up 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 views.  There's not much chance of that, because every human being on earth would have to watch it 1.29 billion times to reach that number.)

Thanks to Oana for sharing this video with us. Today is Saint Nicholas Day, but unlike Christmas, it's not something we celebrate much in the UK. The video is full of interesting facts of the origin of St Nicholas, who is the forerunner of Santa Claus. If there's a part you don't understand, post a question here, with the time it appears in the video, and we'll see if we can help you out.

The most "followed" accounts on Twitter are:- 1. Lady Gaga @ladygaga – 26m 2. Justin Bieber @justinbieber – 24m 3. Katy Perry @katyperry – 22m 4. Rihanna @rihanna – 21m 5. Britney Spears @britneyspears – 18m 6. Barack Obama @BarackObama – 17m 7. Shakira @shakira – 16m 8. Taylor Swift @taylorswift13 – 15m 9. Kim Kardashian @KimKardashian – 15m 10. Youtube @YouTube – 14m  I wonder how many of them write their own tweets? PS -  I follow YouTube.  Source

Purely MHO:- Politics was a big theme in 2012. The Sunday Telegraph claimed that the Tories were launching a hunt to replace recently-departed "blue skies" thinker Steve Hilton using the format of a new reality TV show. The Observer said David Cameron had asked the Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder to come to Downing Street to advise him on issues of class. (Hubby and I fell for this one.) The Independent on Sunday reported on police stations holding "hosepipe amnesties" for the public to hand in garden hoses ahead of a hosepipe ban in south-east England (the hosepipe ban was real, just the amnesty was a joke). The Sunday Times' Style magazine hoped to catch out readers with its double-page spread on "Lemac", a new Middle-Eastern beauty treatment where customers are injected with cells from the humps of camels. Readers of The Sun on Sunday reported that Arsenal football club was releasing its own fragrance, which took its aromas from the E...

According to Google, YouTube now streams 4 billion online videos a day. (Most of the videos still do not make money, but about three billion videos a week are monetized. I account for a couple a day.)

According to Youtube, 24 hours of video material gets uploaded onto the site every minute. (Unfortunately when I try to upload anything it takes me about 24 hours to upload one minute.)  

YouTube has been going for 5 years. (It now gets more than 2 billion hits a day. Happy birthday YouTube.)

Warning to elves! A cute little bunny gets eaten in this film!

According to the Guardian newspaper, only 3% of London street robberies are solved with the help of CCTV evidence. (This is in spite of the fact that Britain had more CCTV cameras than any other European country. A spokesperson said that officers often avoided trawling through CCTV images "because it's hard work". Why not put them up on YouTube, and let the public do it?)

This sentence contains nine ways in which the letter combination "ough" can be pronounced. "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed. You can listen to me reading this on YouTube."