Share And Share Alike

What do the forty most share articles on Facebook for 2011 tell us?

Well, for starters, we can see why they call it the mainstream media with the leader board dominated by just a handful of the major news sources.  The same usual suspects such as The New York Times, CNN, Yahoo appear over and over again while making room for a few slots for the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

Second, we seem to look to share the fun stuff instead of the hard news. From “Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps” to “Giant crocodile captured alive in Philippines” to “Premissive parents: Curb your brats”, sensational headlines were doing their job this year by capturing our collective attention.  We also have an obvious fascination with horoscopes as news about Zodiac signs grabbed three spots in the Top 40.

However, the tragic earthquake in Japan was the dominator of the the chart with four appearances with “Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami” from The New York Times taking the #1 spot.