Pope Francis proved to be the most talked about person on the Internet in 2013, beating out the UK’s glamorous new mother, Kate Middleton, and the scandal-plagued Barack Obama.

The Daily Mail is reporting that the results of research conducted by The Global Language Monitor (GLM), a Texas-based firm that tracks and scans conversations on blogs, social networks and news site, found Pope Francis to be at the top of the list of most oft-repeated names.

In second place came Obamacare, followed by the NSA (National Security Administration) in third place, Edward Snowden in fourth place and Kate Middleton rounding out the top five.

Francis also scored in the top five on the list of most often used words. His twitter handle, #pontifex, came in fourth, behind “404” (a technical error code) which came in first, followed by “fail” and “hashtag”.

Francis did not score in the list of top phrases for the year, with “toxic politics”, “federal shutdown”, “global warming”, “federal deficit”, and “tread lightly” making the top five on the list for 2013.

The top three names of 2012 were Newtown, Malala Yousafzai (the Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by Taliban) and Xi Jinping (President of China).

The top three words were “Apocalypse/Armageddon”, “Deficit”, and “Olympiad.” The Top three phrases were “Gangnam Style”, “climate change/global warming” , and “fiscal cliff.”

In order to make the list, a word, name or phrase has to be used at least 25,000 times and appear in various forms of media.

GLM’s NarrativeTracker technology scans blogs, social media and news sites from the leading 275,000 print and electronic worldwide magazines and newspapers.

© All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace®  http://www.womenofgrace.com