TV brands are the most followed brands on Foursquare

Traditional media make up the majority of most followed brands on the location-based service Foursquare. Metro, the global daily newspaper of Swedish origin, is one of the 30 most followed brands, for example. More specifically, it is the Canadian arm of Metro that holds that position, with in excess of 9,000 friends on Foursquare. By following Metro News, users can find tips and places that Metro recommends and they can also unlock a Metro Foursquare Badge.

foursquare

According to Fanpagelist.com, the most followed brand on Foursquare is Bravo TV, with 70,000 friends, which is not a whole lot out of a total user base of 3 million.

A blog post on Aboutfoursquare.com suggests that there are two main reasons why not more people follow brand on Foursquare. First, the site doesn’t do a good enough job promoting sponsored badges, leaving brands with the only option to market them through their own channels. The second reason has to do with privacy concerns. Most people aren’t very fond of the idea of letting brands know where they check in.

As you can see, the top 10 list of brands on Foursquare are dominated by traditional media and especially tv shows/stations:

  1. Bravo (tv)
  2. MTV (tv)
  3. Zagat Survey
  4. History (tv)
  5. Bastard Jeans
  6. VH1 (tv)
  7. Bon Appétit Magazine
  8. TLC (tv)
  9. Wall Street Journal
  10. The New York Times

Canada and Sweden most giving people in Haiti earth quake

This is a neat way of illustrating data. It’s an illustration that David McCandless did for UK paper the Guardian and it visualizes how much individual countries have contributed to the Haiti relief. Canadians were the most giving people, based on how much they donated per person on average. Sweden is second, followed by the other Nordic countries Norway, Denmark and Finland.

haiti

The entire data set can be found here.

Footnote: I don’t think 2.51 USD is that much to brag about really. I think we could have done better.

Image credit: mkandlez

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Can you trademark “winter”?

I had to look at the date of this article in IHT, but it unfortunately didn’t say April 1st. Turns out that the Canadian governement is proposing to change the law to grant the organizing committee of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games the rights to common words like “winter”, “gold”, “silver”, “medals”, “sponsor”, “games”, “21st” and “2010”. The article says that journalists are exempted from the law, but will bloggers get the green light too? Probably not, if the IOC has the same anti-blog attitude as in the past.

[Via Dennis.]