I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

You might be interested in The Best Places To Find The Most Popular (& Useful) Resources For Educators –2011.

Today, I’d like to share a new related resource I recently found — The Huffington Post’s “Most Popular” page. There you’ll find the stories, videos and slideshows that readers of the Huffington Post, one of the most visited sites on the Web, have shared or visited the most.

I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

You might be interested in The Best Places To Find The Most Popular (& Useful) Resources For Educators –2010.

Today, I’m posting about Show Me Trend. It lists the different “trending” topics on Twitter divided by country. There are actually several other applications that do the same thing. Show Me Trend, though, stands out because the topics are links to newspaper articles and other sources giving background on the topic.

As regular readers know, I periodically publish posts sharing what some organizations list as the “most popular” sites or services. I find them interesting and sometimes useful (see The Best Places To Find The Most Popular (& Useful) Resources For Educators –2011).

Every six months or so, I also publish Postrank’s listing of their determination of the “most engaging” education blogs (it changes weekly). I take all these lists with a grain of salt, but it can’t hurt to see a list of who might  have important roles in the online discussion about education. Obviously, the usefulness of Postrank’s criteria is very debatable.  At the very least, it’s a source of potential new blogs to read.

You can see the entire PostRank list here. And here are the “top ten”:

1. Free Technology For Teachers

2. Mindshift

3. New York Times Education

4. Teacher Lingo

5. Voice of San Diego

6. Angela Maiers

7. Big Education Ape

8. Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day

9. Joanne Jacobs

10. Cool Cat Teacher

I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

I’ve made quite a few posts that fit into this category, and thought I’d highlight which ones I thought were the best and most useful for educators.

You might also be interested in previous editions:

The Best Places To Find The Most Popular (& Useful) Resources For Educators –2010

The Best Places To Find The Most Popular (& Useful) Resources For Educators –2009

Here are my choices for The Best Places To Find The Most Popular (& Useful) Resources For Educators — 2011 (not listed in order of preference):

The Most Popular Subjects On Twitter: “What’s Up” is a fascinating tool that lets you easily explore the most popular subjects on Twitter for any day or for any hour of that day. The Information Aesthetics blog has more information about the site.

The Most “Engaged” Education Blogs: Many people are familiar with PostRank (recently acquired by Google), which ranks blogs by an engagement level. You can see their complete ranking of education blogs here

Most Popular TED Talks: Check out the 20 Most-Watched TED Talks.

Popular Websites: Top Web is a new site that supposedly will show you the top ten most popular sites for any topic. In some quick testing, it appeared to me that their algorithm worked relatively well.

Most Popular Education Twitterers: Mike Petrilli published a list of the most popular twitterers (tweeters?) on Twitter (see All A-Twitter about Education). He used the ranking system called Klout to make his determination. He also received a lot of “pushback” from key folks left off the list, so take it with a grain of salt.

YouTube Videos: YouTube Trends describes itself like this:

Created by YouTube, YouTube Trends is a new destination for the latest trending videos and video trends on YouTube and a resource for daily insight into what’s happening in web video. By making use of viewership data and aggregating the wisdom of top curators across the web, YouTube Trends surfaces popular videos in real time, and provides a blog of broader trends developing within the YouTube community.

It seems pretty useful and interesting.

Twitter Hashtags: “What The Trend” monitors thousands of “hashtags,” the words following the “#” sign, on Twitter. They are used to help Twitter users follow all tweets on a particular topic. What The Trend will help you understand what particular hashtags mean, which are the most popular at any given moment, and which are popular in what country. It actually looks pretty interesting.

NPR: National Public Radio or NPR (though I believe they may officially only be called NPR now)lists the most viewed, most commented, and most recommended stories over the previous 24 hours at their Most Popular page

Social Media Trends: Rrrewind is like a “Today In History” site for social media. Here’s how TechCrunch describes it:

[It] lets you see what was hot on Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, Reddit, Hulu, Yahoo Videos, YouTube, Dribbble, Flickr, Amazon and Yahoo Buzz for any day in 2010 and some in 2009. Like a snapshot in virality or a Popurls with a history focus, Rrrewind allows you to go back in time and see an archive of the most viewed items on the Internet.

CNN Stories: CNN’s “News Pulse” is a new and very sophisticated section of their website where you can identify what stories are the most popular. That kind of feature, obviously, isn’t new. But at News Pulse you can identify the criteria you want — which subject area and in what period of time.

Facebook: All Things Now lists the most shared content on Facebook.

Bitly: Bitly News lists the most popular links that have used the Bit.ly url address-shortening service.

While you’re at it, you might be interested in seeing some “year-end” popular lists:

Top searches 2011 from Yahoo

Top Bing Searches in 2011

Facebook’s Most Shared Articles of 2011 List

Most Popular Searches of 2011 from LIFE

Feedback is always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 800 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

“What’s Up” is a fascinating tool that lets you easily explore the most popular subjects on Twitter for any day or for any hour of that day. The Information Aesthetics blog has more information about the site.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Beginning To Learn What Twitter Is All About.

In addition, I’m including this post in a category where I list web tools that help you identify “most popular” items on the Web.

Many people are familiar with PostRank (recently acquired by Google), which ranks blogs by an engagement level.

You can see their complete ranking of education blogs here, but I thought I’d share their top fifteen here:

1. Inside Higher Ed

2. MindShift

3. Free Technology for Teachers

4. NYT > Education

5. voiceofsandiego.org — All articles, full feed

6. Government 2.0 in Action

7. Joanne Jacobs

8. BlogHighEd.org

9. The Thinking Stick

10. Dangerously Irrelevant

11. Stephen’s Web ~ OLDaily

12. Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

13. Teach For Us :: the Teach For America blog network Posts

14. Moving at the Speed of Creativity

15. Big Education Ape

I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

You might be interested in The Best Places To Find The Most Popular (& Useful) Resources For Educators –2010.

Today, I’d like to share a list of the 20 Most-Watched TED Talks.

I’m also adding it to The Best Teacher Resources For “TED Talks” (& Similar Presentations).

I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

You might be interested in The Best Places To Find The Most Popular (& Useful) Resources For Educators –2010.

Today, I’m posting about Top Web, a new site that supposedly will show you the top ten most popular sites for any topic. In some quick testing, it appeared to me that their algorithm worked relatively well.

Let me know what you think.

I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

You might be interested in The Best Places To Find The Most Popular (& Useful) Resources For Educators –2010.

Today, I’d like to share about VideoInBox, which will send you a daily email filled with the day’s top viral videos. It’s a project of Google, though you have to sign-in with a Facebook ID. You can read more about it at TechCrunch’s post, VideoInbox, Another Google/Slide Production, Brings Viral Videos To Your Inbox.

I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

You might be interested in The Best Places To Find The Most Popular (& Useful) Resources For Educators –2010.

Today, I’d like to share about a site called Vuclip, which tells, and shows, you the most popular video clips seen around the world on mobile devices.

You can read more about it at the TechCrunch blog.