What’s Atlanta watching?

Forget about PRISM, YouTube’s mapping our viewing patterns
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Everyone’s fretting about U.S. government surveillance of phone calls and Facebook, but what about spying by YouTube? The YouTube Trends blog includes an interactive map that shows the three most popular videos on any given day in 150 regions throughout the United States–among them Atlanta. We wondered just what this monitoring might reveal, so we asked YouTube to track Atlanta’s top picks for the past week. It all feels a bit random to us, so maybe you need to be an intelligence agent to find a pattern in the following:

Monday, June 3
Mean Girls revisited, Compton style.
Views: 1 million
Trending: three other regions

Tuesday, June 4
A kid drops his cymbal during the national anthem and doesn’t know what to do with his hands.
Views: 2.1 million
Trending: 83 other regions

Wednesday, June 5
A father and his toddler son cover a Beatles song together. So cute.
Views: 1.9 million
Trending: thirteen other regions

Thursday, June 6
Atlanta still couldn’t get enough of that dad-son Beatles sing-along.
Views: 2.8 million
Trending: thirteen other regions

Friday, June 7
Morehouse alum Samuel L. Jackson delivers a Breaking Bad monologue…from a living room?
Views: 933,000
Trending: fourteen other regions

Saturday, June 8
Brian Williams raps “Straight out of Compton” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
Views: 75,000
Trending: eight other regions

Sunday, June 9
And, of course, a preview of last night’s Game of Thrones episode.
Views: 1.3 million
Trending: 28 other regions

A few other good ones from the top threes of last week: Sad Dog Diary, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s on-plane performance, and that adorable/controversial, depending on your viewpoint, Cheerios commercial.

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