• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, May 10, 2013

Unruly, the company that tracks video sharing, reports this morning that five Vine videos are shared on Twitter every second.

Its list of the top shares of Vine’s six-second videos is pretty unimpressive--a guy sharing a joint with his mother is a personal favorite. Unruly released data on the occasion of Vine’s 100-day anniversary.

Unruly’s date, collected from its new Vine app, says branded Vine videos are four times more likely to be shared than ordinary video though I don’t think any of the top ten came from any branding effort at all.     

According to Unruly, out of 10 million Vines it monitored, only 433 had more than 500 tweets, and just 51 had more than 2,000. As a piece of random information, I’m trying to figure out why, according to Unruly, most Vine activity occurs between 10-11 am EDT. More sharing occurs on the weekend than during all the other days of the week combined.

 The most Vines tweeted—19,667—came from 3-4 p.m. EDT on April 15, just after the Boston Marathon. One Vine video caught the explosion of one of the bombs, and is on the Top Ten list.

But based on this survey, it’s hard to conclude that Vine is either a huge social influencer at this point, though the sheer number of followers and users, I guess, makes its own statement.       

Far from home, and also, home:  I am away for a few days, in Cleveland, the town where I grew up, where I’ve joined some friends from Oakland, who are on a baseball park tour of the Midwest. It was time for the Indians this week.

Handily, they were playing the Oakland A’s, and my hometown Tribe smoked ‘em four straight, including the two games we saw.  Video has hardly been involved, except for a controversial call by the umpires on Wednesday, when they called an Oakland A’s home run a double, which prevented the A’s from tying the game.  They even reviewed a video—now standard procedure in baseball—and stuck by their decision. In the aftermath, the American League is trying to figure out how they got it so wrong,  even after looking at the video.

Of course, that was hardly the real news in Cleveland, where all the attention is on Ariel Castro, the guy accused of holding three women captive for around a decade without arousing any notice from authorities or his neighbors.  Downtown hotels are now packed with media. Hey, Anderson Cooper’s in town!  I was thinking while I’ve been here that if the Boston Marathon bombings constituted a “victory” for social media and readily-available video, this kidnapping situation represents the situation turned around. No Facebook pages, or Twitter accounts or YouTube posts helped find them, or expose the twisted guy who allegedly held them.  Indeed, these victims may only now be learning about the existence of YouTube and other Internet progressions.   

Actually, the attention is not on Castro, but on those women this sexual predator kept closeted in his home. In Cleveland the other day, WTAM, the all-talk/news station was the first I heard note that these victims were now being held against their wills and forced to stay indoors at their relatives’ homes by the hoard of media that stalked their every movement.  After a decade of gruesome detention, I was thinking, they still haven’t had more than a few moments to experience the glorious days of sunshine. On the radio, the woman covering the story for the station said, sympathetically, that it might be better for the victims to quickly tell their stories to the media--so that they’d finally leave town.

pj@mediapost.com