Mapping Online Publics

I’m writing this from the University of Urbino, where I am spending a week as an academic visitor, leading up to a one-day mini-conference on research methods on Thursday, which I’ll blog about in a few days’ time.

Since I’m here, I thought it might be useful to do a quick comparative study of the popular uses of YouTube, looking at Italy and Australia, – Australia because obviously that’s the focus of our current project; and Italy because, well, I’m here and have access to local knowledge, and I think there could be some interesting similarities and differences. Also, Axel and I are gearing up for the ECREA pre-conference ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ in a few weeks’ time – while we’ll be discussing the blog and twitter mapping we’ve been doing, the issues of working within and across ‘national containers’ is currently at the front of my mind.

I am going to post these preliminary research notes on YouTube in Italy and Australia in two parts:

1. A look at the 20 most viewed videos of all time, comparing the Australian and Italian versions (that’s this post)
2. A look at the 20 most subscribed channels in the same locations (that’s the next post).

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As we head into the last week before the Australian federal election, here’s a quick update to my last post where I collected together the most-tweeted YouTube videos out of the #ausvotes Twapperkeeper archive so far. That post only took us up to Friday 6 August – which is centuries ago in election time.

Last week (Sunday 8 Aug to Saturday 15 Aug) saw a few breakthrough hits, especially the ABC’s Gruen Nation fake pro-Greens ad produced by Republic of Everything; some snippets of Sky news coverage; and the usual retweets of official campaign ads. Note that the reasonably popular Time Warp spoof (the ALP’s attempt at a ‘viral’ video) seems to have been pulled by YouTube due to alleged copyright infringement, but as of now it’s still up on Vimeo. Results follow below.

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Update: this analysis covers a few less days than I originally stated – the results should look quite different once we add in this week’s links (and next week’s!).

Here are the top 20 Australian election-related YouTube videos so far up to last Friday morning, according to the Twitterati. Or to be more precise, here are the 20 videos which have been linked to the most in tweets containing the #ausvotes hashtag posted between 17 July and 6 August, according to the Twapperkeeper archive.

Couple of interesting things to note:

• the mismatches between the Twitter link rankings of some of these videos with the number of views they have received on YouTube;
• the low numbers of links generally (could be a glitch with the scripts, but I’m reasonably confident it isn’t)
• the reasonably solid performance of ‘made-for-web’ comedy videos performed and/or produced by professionals
• the high retweet value of ‘official’ campaign videos (in which I’d probably count GetUp!) – although it’s important to note that the tweets that go alongside the videos are frequently less-than flattering…
• and if I may add a personal note, the only mild sharpness or funniness of even the sharpest and funniest of these videos…

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