I know the Wii is popular, but this is ridiculous: according to the number crunchers at GfK Chart-Track, Nintendo’s Wii console is now in one-third of British homes. That means there are more Wiis than cats (or dogs!) in the UK.

Needless to say, Nintendo has leapt on this (admittedly impressive) stat in its marketing for Christmas, which will involve the Queen appearing in an advert for the company. Or Helen Mirren. Which is sort of the same thing. Also appearing will be Terry Wogan, Alexandra Burke, and X Factor poppets JLS.

Nintendo’s dominance is greater in the UK than almost anywhere else – and just to prove it, GfK Chart-Track points out that one in six Brits own a Nintendo DS.

[Via GamesIndustry.biz]

Nintendo’s Wii more popular than cats in the UK is a post from: The Inquisitr

It has only be a few days since the roll out of the Twitter Lists and while most of the social media mavens are getting woodies over how great this is all going to be we are seeing new ideas being thought of each day, hour, minute that will only go to show just how badly this potentially great idea is going to get abused left right and center.

The current top idea that has come to light today is the idea being brought to you by a <shudder> social media consultancy </shudder> called Simplyzesty. It started yesterday with them creating a hand curated list of Twitterers who live in Ireland, and now today the word is that they are starting with lists for the US and UK.

The thing is with these lists is that they will be using some sort of automated system to create these two lists. Automated huh, well we all know that means that just as with any other scripts that can be run this stand the chance of being hijacked in some form or another.

According to Mike Butcher at TechCrunch (Europe) the process for getting on these lists will be as follows:

“Here’s how you get yourself into the list. The Irish one was built by hand, but the others are going to be built with a script but (sic) Twitter users tweeting “I want to get listed #TwitterCalifonia [or another state]” and Simplyzesty will collect all the tweets and add them to the lists for each State. In the UK Twitter users can tweet #TwitterEssex, replacing the county name with the county you live in.”

While Butcher notes that this won’t be a comprehensive list of sat Twitterers in Washington State or in London England I would be willing to bet that it will be full of spammer Twitter accounts. There is no mention in anything I have read about this automation of creating Country specific list as to whether there will be any oversight as to who actually gets on those lists.

Even the guys at The Next Web are having a hard time seeing any real value to the whole idea.

While it’s certainly interesting to see what everyone in a particular area is talking about, this isn’t the way to do it. All the company will have produced is a list of the people who are attention-seeking enough to want to be on it. What about all the other people out there in your state or county who aren’t on the list? Don’t they have something interesting to say?

On the surface, as with much of Web 2.0 and social media the warm and fuzzy of the goodness of man will win out, ideas like these are bound to become a way for spammers and less than ethical marketers to get their names on as many lists as possible thereby diluting the value of the original concept.

Call me pessimistic if you want but I tend to look at stuff like this with a healthy dose of realism and an understanding of how human nature isn’t always as pure in its motives as we might like to think.

Another brilliantly stupid idea of Twitter Lists – Country Lists is a post from: The Inquisitr

At one time regardless of the number of new bloggers that poop-up up a daily basis one of the first ting we all did was to sign up for a Technorati account. This was the best way at the time to see how well our blog(s) where doing against the rest of ht blogosphere. It was out of the Technorati listings that we first got use to the term of a-Listers as well has our own ranking based on the number of discovered links that linked back to our posts..

Over the years though as the service tried to find new ways to make relevant to bloggers of all types that have showily moved further and further away from their core business – being an valuable ranking system an blog discovery system for other bloggers. Unfortunately even with their new leadership this divergence for the core business has progressed even further; with the individual becoming secondary to mainstream media being the driving force for a service barely limping.

In fact if you look at the numbers that have been collected by Dean Takahashi from the VentureBeat Blog it is easy to see that rather than the individual blogger; or the small blog networks it is all about mainstream publication taking over the ranking systems. In his breakdown Dean provides the numbers for the last 30 days – as well as the gainers and losers.

New to the top 50
The Dallas Morning News
San Jose Mercury News
Star Tribune

Out of the top 50
US News & World Report
Rolling Stone
Christian Science Monitor
International Herald Tribune (now part of nytimes.com)

Five biggest gainers in rank
PBS
The Houston Chronicle
Google News
NY Post
Slate

Five biggest losses in rank
The Economist
Chicago Tribune
The White House
Financial Times
Newsweek

Five biggest gainers in attention
YouTube
The Wall Street Journal
CNN
LA Times
Wired

Five biggest losses in attention
Reuters
Telegraph.co.uk
The Boston Globe
Financial Times
The Economist

Overall Rankings and Attention
1.   YouTube 60,644
2.   The New York Times 17,374
3.   guardian.co.uk 8,039
4.   The Wall Street Journal ­7,513
5.   The Washington Post 6,891
6.   CNN 6,330
7.   Telegraph.co.uk ­5,380
8.   Yahoo! News 5,070
9.   MSNBC 5,036
10. The Los Angeles Times 4,536
11. Reuters ­4,314
12. FOX News 4,001
13. The Boston Globe 3,838
14. USA Today 3,619
15. Daily Mail 3,530
16. Time 3,524
17. BBC News 3,399
18. NPR 3,189
19. NY Daily News 2,588
20. Forbes 2,534
21. San Francisco Chronicle 2,420
22. Slate 2,187
23. CBS News 2,156
24. Google News 2,093
25. Wired 2,062
26. Financial Times 2,056
27. PBS 2,053
28. NY Post 2,025
29. San Francisco Examiner 1,968
30. BusinessWeek 1,949
31. The White House 1,929
32. Salon 1,928
33. Chicago Tribune 1,924
34. Newsweek 1,880
35. CNNMoney 1,712
36. CBC 1,696
37. Yahoo! Finance 1,642
38. The Economist 1,565
39. New York Magazine 1,550
40. philly.com 1,288
41. The Houston Chronicle 1,120
42. Science Daily 1,093
43. MarketWatch 1,076
44. People 1,066
45. Miami Herald 1,049
46. The Seattle Times 1,049
47. Yahoo! Sports 1,047
48. The Dallas Morning News 939
49. San Jose Mercury News 879
50. Star Tribune 877

These are the top mover and shakers of the Technorati service, and where even a really a year a go you could still find some of the big name tech bloggers it would seem that those day’s are long gone.

Technorati, the little service that couldn’t is a post from: The Inquisitr