An anonymous bidder has won an auction for the hat that launched a thousand memes.
The hat, a Philip Treacey creation worn by Princess Beatrice at her cousin Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding last month, fetched £81,000, or around $131,648, on eBay Sunday evening. The hat’s eBay page, now unfortunately taken down, described the hat as a “unique sculptural celebratory headpiece in delicate tea rose silk.”
The funds will be donated to UNICEF UK and Children in Crisis. There were more than 64 bids, according to the Guardian, including one from Australian children’s TV stars The Wiggles.
“I’ve been amazed by the amount of attention the hat has attracted,” the Princess said. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to raise as much money as possible for two fantastic charities.” The proceeds went to Unicef and Children in Crisis.
Would you ever pay more than $100,000 for a piece of royal headgear? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy of Princess Beatrice’s Ridiculous Royal Wedding Hat Facebook Page
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Last week, we predicted that the Royal Wedding would be the number one trending topic this time around. And we would have been right, if not for a bit of news that broke last Sunday.
The shots that took down Osama bin Laden were shots heard ’round the Twitterverse. A mind-boggling record of 12.4 million tweets per hour (5,106 tweets per second around the time of President Obama’s speech) helped to place all topics connected to the biggest news story of the year at number one this week.
It should be noted that despite the intensity of the bin Laden news, the Royal Wedding did come in at a close second.
To see the full list, check out the chart below. Because this is a topical list, hashtag memes and games have been omitted from the chart. The aggregate is based on Twitter’s own trending algorithm, and does not necessarily reflect raw tweet volume.
You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section.
|
Rank
|
Topic
|
Intensity
|
Description
|
|
#1
|
Osama bin Laden
|
3
|
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by a small team of Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan. President Obama announced the news late Sunday night (ET). |
|
#2
|
Royal Wedding
|
3
|
Prince William and Catherine Elizabeth "Kate" Middleton were married on April 29, 2011 at Westminster Abbey. |
|
#3
|
Harry Potter Movie/Book Series
|
2
|
On Twitter, Harry Potter fans were talking about Luna Lovegood, Neville Longbottom, Molly Weasley, Severus Snape, Hermione Granger, Bellatrix Lestrange, Fred Weasley and Sirius Black. |
|
#4
|
Justin Bieber
|
2
|
Justin Bieber accidentally tweeted #pssst when he was trying to tweet #pissed instead, thus causing this to trend. People are tweeting secrets to one another or showing reasons why someone is "pissed." Users asked their followers if they prefer Justin Bieber or Bruno Mars. |
|
#5
|
Soccer/Football
|
1
|
Much discussed football topics include Sunday’s upcoming Manchester United vs. Chelsea match, Lionel Messi, the retirement of Sami Tuomas Hyypiä, the Queens Park Rangers fault, the Champions League match Manchester United v Schalke and the Derby between two massive soccer clubs from Brazil: Grêmio Foot-ball Porto Alegrense and Sport Club Internacional. |
|
#6
|
Star Wars Day
|
1
|
Science fiction fans celebrated Star Wars on the 4th of May, tweeting the phrase "May the Fourth be with you!" |
|
#7
|
Lady Gaga
|
1
|
Lady Gaga fans were excited about the release of "Judas," her latest music videol. And it’s not clear how or when it started, but users are tweeting "Lord Voldemort + Lady Gaga = Lord Gaga." |
|
#8
|
Chris Brown
|
1
|
On Thursday, R&B singer Chris Brown turned 22 years old and his fans sent him good wishes. |
|
#9
|
NBA Playoffs
|
1
|
Fans were most vocal about the Miami Heat meeting the Boston Celtics in the NBA Conference Semi-Finals. Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls was announced the winner of the Maurice Podoloff Trophy as the 2010-11 Kia NBA Most Valuable Player Award. |
|
#10
|
Owl City
|
1
|
Indonesian Tweeters were excited over an announcement that the band Owl City would be playing a concert in Jakarta on October 28. Also, fans were saying how much they liked the Owl City song "Vanilla Twilight." |
Data aggregate courtesy of What the Trend.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, 123render
Interested in more Twitter resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.More About: osama bin laden, royal wedding, social media, Top Twitter Topics, trends, twitter
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YouTube’s livestream of the Royal Wedding was viewed more than 72 million times last Friday, the company has revealed.
That’s a higher number than the number of people living in the UK. In fact, if royal wedding web viewers were to form a nation (perhaps one in which everyone wears fancy hats), it would be the 19th largest country in the world.
And those 72 million views only represent YouTube’s official Royal Channel. Several other platforms also posted live video of the royal wedding. For instance, Livestream reported that the event set a new record on its site with 300,000 concurrent visitors.
Wedding viewers were mostly from the United Kingdom and United States, according to the YouTube blog. Italy, Germany and France had the next-highest number of viewers on the platform.
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Twitter says it saw its most expansive integration with television to date during the recent Royal Wedding, and it suggests that engagement on Twitter drives TV viewership.
The company featured the above video in a blog post, providing a glimpse at how TV and Twitter have grown closer over the years. Looking at the footage, the rapid growth of the platform’s legitimacy is impressive — especially when late night host David Letterman was making fun of Twitter a year ago.
To be sure, Twitter has increasingly found a place in mainstream TV programming. Social sharing is included in ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy Sync for iPad and NBC’s iPad app, as well as most second-screen offerings.
And then there are the tie-ins. MTV gave a big thumbs-up to Twitter with its search for the first-ever TJ, or Twitter Jockey, and The Science Channel introduced Twitter to its programming last year by adding tweets to An Idiot Abroad. Super misanthropic series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia even introduced Twitter into its show with Sunny Tweets, an app that let users interact with each other and featured the program’s actors tweeting during the show.
We’ve been questioning whether Twitter is playing a hand in increased viewership for a while now — the 2010 Grammy Awards saw a 35% increase over the 2009 event, perhaps in part due to social integration. Most recently, the Super Bowl saw massive engagement on Twitter — setting a new record at the time for tweets per second. The Super Bowl also drew the highest ever audience for a U.S. TV show.
It will be interesting to see how viewership and Twitter engagement changes as more folks cut the cord. TV ownership recently dropped for the first time since 1992, and while Nielsen is yet unsure as to whether newer platforms had an effect on said drop (or if it was just the economy), the growing ubiquity of tablets and alternative methods of viewing in coming years is sure to have some impact as the distance decreases between TV and social channels.
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It looks like a match made in heaven — the Royal Wedding and social media. The last such affair, back in 1981, was a TV-centric event, but this time around, spectators were also following along on their so-called second screens. The event broke live streaming records and as we see in the list below, dominated Twitter conversations not only for the week of the event, but for the whole month of April.
Otherwise, this month’s list is fairly boring: The Bieb is back. Sports are huge and so are boy bands and holidays (including 4/20.) Perhaps the only big surprise is the appearance by My Chemical Romance, whose fans seemed to have been on a mission to get the band in the top 10. In the end, though, they couldn’t beat a Royal Flush.
To see the full list, check out the chart below. Because this is a topical list, hashtag memes and games have been omitted from the chart. The aggregate is based on Twitter’s own trending algorithm, and does not necessarily reflect raw tweet volume.
You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section.
|
Rank
|
Topic
|
Intensity
|
Description
|
|
#1
|
Royal Wedding
|
2
|
Prince William and Catherine Elizabeth “Kate” Middleton were married on April 29, 2011 at Westminster Abbey. Users also shared songs that should be played at their wedding and taking popular movie titles and placing a reference or a pun based on the Royal Couple. |
|
#2
|
Justin Bieber
|
1
|
Justin Bieber’s account reached 9 million followers so his fans RT’d “@justinbieber: WOOOHOOOO…BIEBER GONE WILD!!!!” Also ,this week, tens of thousands of Indonesians went to Sentul International Convention Center (SICC), where Bieber performed during his World Tour. |
|
#3
|
Soccer/Football
|
1
|
Real Madrid beat Barcelona, 1-0, to win the Copa del Rey tournament on April 20th. Sergio Ramos, the right defender of Real Madrid, dropped the Copa del Rey Cup from the top of the team bus during Real’s victory parade through the streets of Madrid & it was crushed. It was later replaced. |
|
#4
|
NBA Playoffs
|
1
|
Basketball fans are talking about Kobe Bryant dunking over Emeka Okafor, LeBron James ("LeBrick") and also a game the New York Knicks lost against Boston Celtics at the Madison Square Garden. |
|
#5
|
April Fool’s Day
|
1
|
April 1st was April Fool’s Day and people & websites played practical jokes. |
|
#6
|
Easter
|
1
|
Christians around the world observed Good Friday and celebrated Easter last weekend. |
|
#7
|
Jonas Brothers
|
1
|
Jonas Brothers fans are sharing symptoms of the “Obsessive Jonas Disorder.” |
|
#8
|
One Direction
|
1
|
This is trending because boy band One Direction fans are having a Twitter feud with the fans of boy band The Wanted. One Direction is a band that was formed by Simon Cowell on the UK TV series X Factor. |
|
#9
|
My Chemical Romance
|
1
|
Fans of the band My Chemical Romance worked overtime to get every band member to appear in Twitter’s Top 10 Trends. Earlier in the month, they celebrated the birthday of band member Gerard Way. |
|
#10
|
4/20
|
1
|
April 20th (4/20) is a counterculture holiday relating to the drug reference “420″ for consuming marijuana. . |
Data aggregate courtesy of What the Trend.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, 123render
Interested in more Twitter resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.More About: 4/20, Easter, royal wedding, Top Twitter Topics, trends, twitter, twitter trends
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The Royal Wedding participants have all put away their tiaras, swords and spurs, and now it’s time to see who created and received the most social media buzz during the gigantic worldwide celebration.
This was undoubtedly a big deal, important enough to get millions of wedding watchers on the U.S. West Coast to wake up at 3 a.m., and here’s the proof. Thanks to Webtrends, now we can see precisely how social media reacted to the glittery nuptials, showing us the key stats of social media buzz from Noon PST on April 28 until 24 hours later.
Check out the infographic below, where you’ll see some surprises. And no, the star of the show was not Pippa Middleton.
How about you? Did you get up in the middle of the night to watch all that traditional pomp and pageantry?
Infographic courtesy Webtrends
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The live-streamed-to-death Royal Wedding brought with it plenty of fodder for a meme-hungry Internet.
While we appreciate the cartwheeling clergyman and shudder with you at the thought of the Cthulhu Hat, our hearts were completely stolen by the scowling attendant now known as the Frowning Flower Girl.
Standing in front of Kate and William on the famous Buckingham Palace balcony where Prince Charles first publicly kissed Diana after the last generation’s Royal Wedding, it was not the bride but rather her three-year-old flower girl who stole the show.
As you can see in this video from the BBC, it seems the little girl, one Grace Van Cutsem, was merely protecting her tender eardrums from the roaring crowd, the din of which grew louder as the newlyweds kissed, and a handful of planes that flew over the palace moments later:
The child’s cranky mug has already been Photoshopped on every macro from Banker Cat to Sad Keanu, and we’d love to see more. We’ve got a lovely PNG of Frowning Flower Girl for you; show us your handiwork in the comments, and we’ll upload any interesting submissions to our gallery here with proper credit.
by Phil Eligio
by Kitty Farts — we got a TON of Trump submissions; clearly FFG isn’t the only one who wants Mr. Trump to can it.
by webireland
by Steve Haman
More About: flower girl, frowning flower girl, Meme, memes, royal wedding
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So some British people got married, and everyone got really excited and stuff, so we guess we should acknowledge the event in some way — aside from, you know, all the articles. Hence today’s YouTube Roundup Theme: Royal Wedding Parodies.
Congrats, kids. May your union be blessed with laughter — some of which will inevitably be at your expense.
Todd Wasserman: Not really a parody, but a decent royal rap.
Meghan Peters: An a capella version of Gaga’s “Bad Romance” rewritten for Kate Middleton.
Ben Parr: The Royal Wedding Rap!
Brian Hernandez: This Sims-style parody of the Royal Wedding features several smooches from the newlyweds, a shirtless Prince Harry and some badass dance moves from the Queen.
Brenna Ehrlich: Aw…
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So some British people got married, and everyone got really excited and stuff, so we guess we should acknowledge the event in some way — aside from, you know, all the articles. Hence today’s YouTube Roundup Theme: Royal Wedding Parodies.
Congrats, kids. May your union be blessed with laughter — some of which will inevitably be at your expense.
Todd Wasserman: Not really a parody, but a decent royal rap.
Meghan Peters: An a capella version of Gaga’s “Bad Romance” rewritten for Kate Middleton.
Ben Parr: The Royal Wedding Rap!
Brian Hernandez: This Sims-style parody of the Royal Wedding features several smooches from the newlyweds, a shirtless Prince Harry and some badass dance moves from the Queen.
Brenna Ehrlich: Aw…
More About: favorite-youtube-videos, humor, pop culture, royal wedding, video, youtube
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So some British people got married, and everyone got really excited and stuff, so we guess we should acknowledge the event in some way — aside from, you know, all the articles. Hence today’s YouTube Roundup Theme: Royal Wedding Parodies.
Congrats, kids. May your union be blessed with laughter — some of which will inevitably be at your expense.
Todd Wasserman: Not really a parody, but a decent royal rap.
Meghan Peters: An a capella version of Gaga’s “Bad Romance” rewritten for Kate Middleton.
Ben Parr: The Royal Wedding Rap!
Brian Hernandez: This Sims-style parody of the Royal Wedding features several smooches from the newlyweds, a shirtless Prince Harry and some badass dance moves from the Queen.
Brenna Ehrlich: Aw…
More About: favorite-youtube-videos, humor, pop culture, royal wedding, video, youtube
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