This is my usual introduction to one of these “most popular” posts:

As regular readers know, I’ve been posting “most popular” lists of websites 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.”

Today, I’d like to share the most popular search search queries used by kids.  Though I’m not quite sure how they figured them out (Richard Byrne was kind enough to share an explanation in the comments on this post), Online Family Norton has a list of the top 100.

Here are the top 20 on their list (you need to go to their site to get the rest):

# 1. YouTube
# 2. Google
# 3. Facebook
# 4. Sex
# 5. MySpace
# 6. Porn
# 7. Yahoo
# 8. Michael Jackson
# 9. Fred (A popular fictional character whose YouTube channel has become a hit among kids.)
# 10. eBay
# 11. You Tube
# 12. YouTube.com
# 13. Gmail
# 14. Wikipedia
# 15. Miley Cyrus (Singer and star of the Disney Channel’s hit series “Hannah Montana.”)
# 16. Webkinz (Toy stuffed animal that comes with a secret code, allowing kids access to the Webkinz World website.)
# 17. Games
# 18. Miniclip (Website with a variety of free online games.)
# 19. Taylor Swift (Country-pop singer)
# 20. Hotmail

Thanks to Read Write Web for the tip.

Delicious, the popular “social bookmarking” tool, has just added some neat features. One is a page where you can see the most popular websites at any given moment.

I’m adding this new “Hot List” page to The Most Popular “Bookmarks” On The Web, which lists other ways to find similar information.

You can read a Tech Crunch post about this change and others on the Delicious site.

As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites 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.”

Today, I’d like to share a site called the Viral Video Chart.

It uses a variety of measuring instruments to determine the most popular videos for every 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, and one year, and they do it in a variety of categories. It looks quite thorough.

Most, though not all, appear to be on YouTube.  You might also want to look at The Best Ways To Access Educational YouTube Videos At School.

Magma is a new site that isn’t open to the public yet, but is worth signing-up for to get an invitation.  Among other things, it shows you a continually updated listing of the most viewed videos on YouTube, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Delicious and a bunch more sites. In addition, you can collect your own lists of the ones you want to save.

Buzz Feed is another place to find what are supposedly the most popular videos on the Web. The selection appears to include some “raunchier” ones than the other sites I have listed in this post, but it does seem to have some other useful funny ones that could be used for activities with English Language Learners. I don’t know how they determine their selection — it’s obviously using a different methodology than the others.

I thought people might be interested in seeing a list of the most popular websites for kids:

10 Most Popular Websites for Kids

It comes from something called KIDO’Z, and lists what they claim are “top ten” sites most-visited by kids in English, Spanish, French, and Italian.

Read Write Web has a different list that’s about a year old focusing on the most popular sites for those under 12 in Great Britain.

As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites 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.”

As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites or 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 or books, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

Today, I thought I’d share a list of the most popular fiction authors of all-time.

Wikipedia has an extensive list. You might find it interesting to see everybody they have listed, including the number of books sold and their genres. I thought I’d just list the top eleven here:

1. William Shakespeare

2. Agatha Christie

3. Barbara Cartland

4. Harold Robbins

5. Georges Simenon

6. Enid Blyton

7. Danielle Steel

8. Dr. Seuss

9. Gilbert Patten

10. Leo Tolstoy

11. J. K. Rowling

As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites or 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.”

This is a simple, but interesting one.

If you’d like to find which links have been bookmarked on Delicious the most since the service began, go to Popacular and click on “All Time.”

At the time I was writing this post, the top nineteen were:

As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites 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.”

This particular list is sort of a supplement to The Best Tools To Help Develop Global Media Literacy, where I share resources that students and teachers can use to compare and contrast how different current events are handled by media in different countries.

I also plan on developing a similar list of the most popular news slideshows and videos.

Here are some Places To Find The Most Popular News Stories On The Web:

The Newseum has front pages each day from newspapers around the world.

BBC News has a neat Live World Map that shows what news is popular in what part of the world at anytime. Here is a good explanation about how it works.

I’ve known for awhile about the next resource I want to share, but Richard Byrne just wrote about it, and he described it perfectly. So I’m going to quote from his post, and I would encourage you to go there to read his ideas on how to use it with students:

“Ten by Ten is a unique program that links images with news stories. Every hour the top 100 news stories from around the world are linked to images on a ten by ten grid. The stories are ranked.”

Here are direct links to regularly updated pages of major news sites that show their most popular news stories:

USA Today Most Popular Stories

MSNBC Most Popular News Stories

CNN — Most Popular

Yahoo News Most Popular News Stories

New York Times Most Popular Articles

Times Of India Most Read Articles

China Daily Most Popular

The Globe and Mail Most Popular

Wall Street Journal Most Popular

Here are a couple of resources from The Best Tools To Help Develop Global Media Literacy that I’d like to highlight in this post:

One is very new and is called Media Cloud — Visualizations. It’s probably worth reading Read Write Web’s extensive post on the site. In a nutshell, you can identify three media sources from throughout the world and then get a chart for their most frequently used words over the past ninety days or a comparative map showing the depth of coverage of different parts of the world. Both visualizations would be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners, and the discussion potential is rich.

Geographical Media is the newest addition to that list.  After you register (which is a free and easy process) you can see which topics are being covered in the news media in different parts of the world, and compare the differences.  The site seems to have a number of other features — and it’s not particularly intuitive how to navigate through them — but the site has a lot of potential. I’m still exploring.

Suggestions and feedback are, as always, welcome.

I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites that I think educators might find useful.

I thought I’d do something different today, and share another kind of “popular” list that I found interesting — one sharing the most popular books and authors of all time.

You can find this information at:

All-Time Bestselling Books and Authors at the Internet Public LIbrary.

I think most people know that The Bible is number one, but you might find some other surprises.

Six weeks ago I kicked off a series of posts highlightng “most popular” lists of websites that I thought 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 made the mistake, though, of using the word “popular” in the first post of this series titled The “Most Popular” Blogs That Might Also Be Useful To Educators.

In that piece, I used Post Rank‘s analysis, which uses a variety of ways to measure levels of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts.  Recently, they’ve begun a system to tabulate this data and develop lists of the most popular blogs in many different categories. The rankings are adjusted each week or so.

It sparked a lot of discussion, including from PostRank, which stated they didn’t like to use the word “popular.”  You can see many comments in that first post about PostRank, and you can also see additional thoughts on the PostRank process at Sue Waters’ blog post Latest Statistics Say My Blogs Are……?

So, even though I’m still categorizing this post in the “most popular site” grouping for the sake of my own internal organizing of posts, I’m very specifically not calling this a list of “most popular education blogs.”

I just thought it would be interesting to see what PostRank lists as the ten “most engaged” education blogs right now — six weeks after my first post on them.

Here they are:

1. LiveScience.com

2. Inside Higher Ed

3. Free Technology for Teachers

4. apophenia

5. NYT > Education

6. Common Craft – Social Design for the Web -

7. Joanne Jacobs

8. BlogHighEd.org

9. Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

10. Cool Cat Teacher Blog

You can see PostRank’s complete listing here.

I thought people might be interested in seeing a list of the most popular reference sites on the Web:

Top 55 Reference Websites | June 2009

As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites 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.”

As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites 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.”

Today, I’m focusing on heath:

20 Most Popular Health Websites | June 2009