Our 10 Most Popular Posts from 2011

I confess I was never really one for watching analytics, but the numbers are a good indication of what kind of stories people seem to enjoy. And this past year there was no shortage of remarkable stories. Some of them were fun, some of them were weird, but all of them were remarkable in some way or another. Check out our ten most popular stories below [1].

1. China’s Anthony Weiner: Govt Official Mistakenly Woos Mistress in Public on Weibo

Our most trafficked post of the year was a story about a Chinese government official who got caught flirting with a mistress on his Weibo microblog, mistakenly thinking that it was a private IM platform! We were lucky to be first to break in English, which subsequently ended up everywhere from The Wall Street Journal to The Daily Beast. Truly the tweet heard around the world, unfortunately for this cheating official.

2. India’s $35 Android Tablet Finally Ready to Launch

This story is an odd one, as we had to publish a number of updates later on as the launch date kept getting pushed and pushed. The most recent update we’ve heard is that it has again been delayed until January, but clearly the public is very excited to see this budget gadget finally launch.

3. Politician Tin Pei Ling Faces Facebook Petition Trouble

The use of social media during the Singapore election was a hot topic on this blog. And this particular story about Facebook petitions opposing Tin Pei Ling of the People’s Action party seemed to spread like wildfire among our Singaporean readers on (you guessed it) Facebook.

4. Zing Me is twice as big as Facebook in Vietnam

Photo: AsiaOne.com

Early in the year we wrote a short piece about Vietnamese social network Zing Me, and how it had about twice as many users in that country as Facebook. The most recent numbers we can find show Zing Me’s numbers at over 7 million. But will things stay that way? Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has spent this Christmas in Vietnam, and it’s possible he might be there to work on getting Facebook unfettered access in the country. Oh well. He could always buy Zing Me, I guess!