#Egypt, #TigerBlood Top Hashtags of 2011

The Arab Spring, Charlie Sheen, and Japan? Yep, sounds like 2011.

It's December, which means there will be a plethora of year-end lists supplanting the reporting, commentary, and analysis we usually read online. One of the more interesting year-enders is the one put out by Twitter showing which hashtags were the most used on the social-networking site over the past year. This year's top two – #Egypt and Charlie Sheen's #TigerBlood – are about as good a definition for 2011 as you're going to find, as they split the difference between the global upheaval and continued celebrity and stupidity deification that made this past year so confounding. The other most-used hashtags include the relatively blase #threewordstoliveby, #idontunderstandwhy, and #improudtosay, as well as #japan, #superbowl, and #jan25 – the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned. Twitter also unveiled the events that caused the most tweets per second, with the MTV Video Music Awards landing the most with 8,868 tweets a second, followed by Troy Davis' execution (7,671) and the end of the FIFA Women's World Cup (7,196). Vancouver was also one of the most-discussed places on the network (after Cairo, Egypt, Japan, Libya, Tokyo, and Dallas), owing mostly to its hockey-related riot.