Top digital stories this week, incl. Draw Something & Friends Revamped

Leah Kayles, Social Media Editor

A news story that caught my eye this week was that of the online petition to feature Second World War code breaker Alan Turing on the new £10 note. I didn’t know there was going to be a new £10 note to be honest, but I had heard of Alan Turing.

A vital contributor to the war effort, Turing’s homosexuality (which was illegal at the time) was overlooked in light of his mathematical genius throughout the war, when he worked cracking German ciphers at Bletchley Park. In 1952 though, when his services were no longer required, Turing was convicted of gross indecency as a result of his sexual orientation, and undertook chemical castration as an alternative to serving jail time. He committed suicide by ingesting cyanide two years later.

Many people still don’t know who Alan Turing is, or what an important part he played in Britain’s history.

Since the petition went live on Wednesday, it has had over 8,000 votes (and counting). Although Gordon Brown issued a public apology for Turing’s treatment in 2009, a campaign to grant his official pardon was rejected by the government this year.

In this digitally-enabled world, however, people have the ideal opportunity to take things into their own hands and ensure that Turing’s hard work and memory is not forgotten.

The link to the e-petition is in this story’s title.

John Carter flop – could it have been avoided through a bit of light reading?

Alex Heaton, Senior Digital Account Manager

If we look at the history behind this film many are completely surprised that the author wrote Tarzan, inspired many famous authors such as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and pushed the limits of science fiction, generations before many of his peers. Many are also surprised to find that John Carter was based on the book ‘A Princess of Mars’ which is in turn part of the Barsoom series consisting of 14 books. These books are out of copyright and are thus available to download and read for free by anyone with a smartphone, tablet, Kindle, PC, etc. I wonder how many people have actually read these books since they became free to download and read.

I tend to read quite a lot of sci-fi and occasionally download a free book or two when I find myself short. A year or two ago I came across these books and ended up reading all of them for free on my iPhone. Whilst admittedly they are quite fantastic in good and bad ways for the modern audience, they are also lots of fun and very addictive reading, making them great for a bit of escapism after a busy day – think Star Wars mixed with LOTR mixed with a bit of Avatar. As a result of reading and enjoying the books I’m 100% going to go and see the film (although I haven’t actually gone yet).

If we also look back at other sci fi/fantasy films that have been a success in recent times, such as Harry Potter and LOTR, each has had a groundswell of excitement because the books have been read and enjoyed by a lot of the film-goers. Interestingly, The Golden Compass was a massive financial success around the world except in one country where the books hadn’t been read very much (the USA).

So, if reading the books guarantees seats at the cinema, then why didn’t Disney spend their £100m marketing budget on marketing the free books?  If they had, perhaps they might have turned a flop into a massive success.

Happy birthday Twitter!

Sally Barr, Online PR and Social Media Manager

Wednesday marked Twitter’s 6th birthday. As with all sixth birthday celebrations, we played musical statues, ate too many Party Rings and found 10 mind-boggling facts to mark the occasion.

Here goes:

• 11 Twitter accounts are created every second – that’s 1 million whole Twitter accounts opened every day!

• 340 million tweets are posted per day

• It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to tweet to the billionth Tweet. It now takes less than three days for that many to be posted today.

• The record for maximum tweets per second to date is 12,233, which was set during Superbowl 2012

• The highest number of retweets a tweet has had on record is 100,000

• The day of highest morale on Twitter is apparently Christmas day, one of lowest was the day Michael Jackson died

• There were 574,000 tweets about Steve Jobs’ death during an 80-minute period

• It will take 86 years for these guys to tweet the full bible. Four months down, only 85 years and 8 months to go!