The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the largest international TV events with an estimated 125 million viewers annually in 56 countries. In spite of this, there are very few photos from the contest available for free use on for example Wikipedia.
To show the Wikipedia community that it was possible to cover a major event and share quality images for common use, Swedish photographer Albin Olsson took advantage of the fact that last year’s final took place in his home country Sweden. He uploaded 870 images and videos from the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 with a Creative Commons license to Wikimedia.
This year as the Eurovision was hosted in Copenhagen, Denmark, Olsson continued and extended his project. He spent two weeks prior to the event covering press conferences and rehearsals. There are now more than 900 photos and video files uploaded to Wikimedia by Olsson, free for usage under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.
The first of two semi finals of the Eurovision Song Contest takes place tonight in Copenhagen, Denmark. New this year is the ambition to bring the participants closer to the audience via social media.
The Social Green Room
Social media has become increasingly important as the place to read and share opinions about the contest. So to make it even easier to find live reporting from the participating countries, the Danish public service television channel DR has created a Social Green Room that collects updates from the artists official Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts. You can either follow a stream of updates or select updates from one country.
Like in recent years, some artists are promoting hashtags of their own, like the Ukraine’s #ticktock. You can also use the country code for each country as a hashtag, like #SWE for Sweden and #DEN for Denmark. A list of country codes can be found here.
Tonight is the first semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 in Malmö, Sweden. The contest is sure to spark an enormous amount of activity in social media and below you can find an extensive list of official Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Instagram accounts and more. Don’t forget to vote and tweet your support for your favourite songs.
Tonight is the second semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan. To follow the different entries and their updates in social networks, see the list below. It is an extensive list of official Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace accounts and more. This list is even more complete than the links on the official Eurovison site. Have fun and may the best songs win.
I made a little experiment yesterday by trying to predict the outcome of the first Eurovision Song Contest semi-final. I used the number of Facebook likes to the country pages at Eurovision.tv and the number of views of the official videos. I was aware that it might not be the most accurate of predictions, since people can like and view a video but not vote for it due to the fact that you can’t vote for your own country and only countries competing in the semi-final could vote for the others.
Nevertheless, the overall rank I got was accurate to some degree. The countries I ranked 1-7 all got selected to the final. Then I failed with the others. The bottom three in my list, as expected, did not qualify. The tough part was the ones in the middle where the differences weren’t that big in the number of likes and views. Hungary, Moldova and Denmark eventually qualified.
The ranking based on Facebook likes was more accurate. The ten that qualified were all in my top 12 and I got all the top 7 in my list correct.
Rank: Facebook likes.
Russia Q
Cyprus Q
Greece Q
Romania Q
Ireland Q
Albania Q
Iceland Q
Finland
Moldova Q
Austria
Hungary Q
Denmark Q
Latvia
Israel
Montenegro
Switzerland
San Marino
Belgium
Let’s see if I can get even better results tomorrow, for semi-final 2 of the Eurovision Song Contest in Baku.
On the Eurovision.tv page, each of the participants in the Eurovision Song Contest is presented with videos, images and more. Readers can share each participant’s page on social networks such as Facebook. In an attempt to predict the outcome of the first semi-final I have looked at how many times each country page has been shared on Facebook and how many times each official video has been viewed.
The overall score shows that Russia and Cyprus are huge favourites, while Switzerland and Belgium may not make it to the final. Late tonight, we will see how accurate these predictions are (I am aware that it is not fool proof, since you are not allowed to vote for your own country for example).
