In honor of the Calgary Stampede, the staff members here at JOIMedia.com put together a website that demonstrates the power of social media and how evolved the community has become in terms of technology and interaction.

The “social experiment” we came up with is called StampedePhotos, which is a live feed of pictures being posted to Twitter using the #Stampede or #CalgaryStampede hashtags since the start of the Stampede on July 8th, 2011.

We are just past the halfway point of this social experiment and some of the numbers we’ve received are just staggering. Here’s a look at some of the surprising (and not-so-surprising) stats we’ve found:

· There are a total of 3785 photos tweeted w/ the hashtag(s) at the end of day 6, meaning that we've averaged around 630 pictures a day! That’s more than one picture every two and a half minutes!

While one of the most common things to do at big events is to go on a bit of a celebrity watch, there were a lot more… unusual trends that popped up in our live feed:

· The Royal Couple graced our fair city during the Calgary Stampede and making a royal appearance on our website 117 times!
· For every five pictures of the Royal Couple, there was one picture of artery-clogging goodness as the now infamous Doughnut Burger has been tweeted 25 times.
· You can’t talk about celebrities without talking about the local Social Media King himself! Mayor Nenshi was photographed and tweeted 50 times over the past week, usually sporting some sort of cowboy attire. Way to get into the spirit mayor!
· Who can resist a photo with a cutout or mural of Justin Bieber? The former overnight YouTube Celebrity graced our live feed 29 times since the Stampede began.
· Do you know the sport of planking? Well 11 people definitely did, as 11 different photos of 11 different people were able to “lay down” the law of the Plank all around the Stampede grounds.

But this social experiment isn’t just for the local eye. 18 different countries from all over the world have taken time out of their lives to browse through our large assortment of Stampede photos, including The United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, Russia, and Jamaica!

Since the best way to tweet a photo from the Calgary Stampede is by mobile device, it only makes sense to take a peek at the different devices looking or contributing to our website. Surprisingly, over 21% of our page views are from mobile devices! Of those mobile users:

· 68.5% of them were using an iPhone
· 17.5% of them were connecting to our site via iPad
· 6.25% of them were firing off their pictures from an Android phone
· 4.25% of them took a break from playing BrickBreaker on their Blackberries to say hello to the rest of the world
· While 3.5% of our mobile users took advantage of the wifi hotspots on the stampede grounds to check out our live feed.

For a project that we thought of doing only 4 days before the start of the Stampede, it is breathtaking how many pictures have been tweeted thus far. But what’s best part about all of this? The Stampede isn’t over yet so make sure you keep taking those photos, tweeting them, and partying like a boss because, believe it or not, we can’t do all the partying ourselves.