Planking craze smashes top 10 articles of the week

13 May 2011, 10:31 am   -   By: Bill Code
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A young man rests at a fast food outlet in a move known as 'planking'. (YouTube)

A young man rests at a fast food outlet in a move known as 'planking'. (YouTube)

Have you been planking lately? Excuse the personal question, but the craze put other world news stories to shame in our top ten news list this week. 

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Have you been planking? I wouldn't admit to it either, but it’s proving mighty popular. This web craze involves lying down flat in wacky places – on ironing boards, postboxes, police cars – and getting your mates to take a photo before sticking it on the web.


And it was this last attempt to plank in front of the nose of Queensland's finest which saw the police start to clamp down – becoming our top article of the week by some distance. No word yet on whether you can plank in bed. 

In number two, readers were taking a leaf from this book, discovering how plants practice safe sex. Despite being a couple of weeks old, this informative podcast did very well after being picked up elsewhere on the web.

And in case you were under a rock, it was budget time. There were big and small announcements-a-plenty, but the main ones were wrapped up in an easy to digest What’s in the budget piece. Keen to know how hard they’d be hit, readers made it a rare finance-focused number three.

In number five, the first of three Bin Laden pieces sneaks in, showing the death of America’s most wanted man isn’t just going to slip out of the news agenda. User-generated content is always able to tick boxes that mainstream media is unable to, and in the hours after the White House released its now iconic ‘Situation Room’ photo – the mockery began. We put some of the funniest photoshop-jobs together in a gallery, and it clicked its behind off to get into number four.

Another gallery  – and a bit an attempt to look back on what might have been missed. Plenty of news almost slipped through the net on the week he died, so we took some of the best images from the news agencies on these other topics – and Bin Laden - and got them on the site.

Syrians have been watching the events in other Arab nations unfold for the last couple of months, but began protesting much later than those in North Africa. Why Syria Matters was the title of an article we wrote which laid out the reasons this small country is so crucial to what happens in the region, and it was the seventh biggest clicker this week, as appetite for Middle East news shows no sign of abating.  

Asylum seekers are never far from the news agenda in Australia. The government’s announcement of a proposed ‘swap’ of people with Malaysia meant there was renewed interest in our asylum-seeker ‘myths and facts’ article – and plenty of comments on the issue to boot. Expect to see this topic keep popping back into view as the push (and  also the pull) factors remain on the table.

Little green men, space travel and good old astronomy always prove popular here at SBS. So the fact that Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and Mars were set to align in our very own southern sky had not just amateur astronomers excited about this rare event.  On Friday morning, SBS reporter Sam Ikin went down to the Sydney Observatory to catch the occasion.

The prediction, it turns out, was correct. The same can’t be said about the predictions of a devastating earthquake which was said to be coming for Rome on May 11. The man who reportedly made the call once came close – by two days – to a quake which hit in 1924, and was knighted by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini for his work. Residents of the capital were said to be preparing their flight - but no quake came.

 

As it turns out, nine people were killed when a 'terremoto' hit southern Spain, a mere 1000km or so to the west. Spooky.

 

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Your Comments

Planking Photos

Jack - from Gold Coast, 1 year

I wish the media would stop promoting this, I know it is news but still. I have seen pictures of babies, I would hate to see someone 'plank' their baby in an unsafe manner without thinking about it. this video shows some innocent and not in danger ones but still: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCR0qFb2Ecs

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