Global Scouse Day: What has Liverpool done for the internet?

John Murray

This Sunday is Global Scouse Day, and although Engage Web is based in Cheshire, we have strong links to the city of Liverpool. We fall under the 0151 dialling code, have employees and clients based in Merseyside, and some of our team follow a certain football team from the city – although they are a bit quieter about that than they were this time last year!

Global Scouse Day was founded by Liverpool filmmaker, adventurer and YouTuber Graham Hughes, and it takes place every year on his birthday, February 28th. Hughes has an incredible number of claims to fame, including being the first and, so far, only person in the world known to have visited every country in the world without flying. That expedition was condensed into his One Second Every Country video, which has amassed more than 1.5 million YouTube views.

Not long after that, he managed to win his own Caribbean island on reality TV show SOS Island. Currently, I’m enjoying the weekly ‘Hughes of the World’ videos on his YouTube channel, where he simply spends an hour talking about a country (yesterday’s video was on Armenia). Perhaps not surprisingly for an enthusiast of travel and border-hopping, Hughes is strongly opposed to Brexit and there are loads of videos on his channel about it if you haven’t had enough of it all!

A big part of Global Scouse Day is the meal that gives the dialect its name, but the celebration extends to “all things Liverpool”. We thought we would join in and look at a few ways the city has contributed to the growth of the internet and social media.

The first full internet browser for a mobile phone was invented by a Scouser

Whipping out your phone and going on the web is something you probably now take for granted, but if it hadn’t been for Liverpool, you might still be stuck with a “dumbphone”.

This article notes that Liverpudlian Adrian McEwen led the team that put together the first mobile phone browser. Perhaps less proudly, he also played a role in the ill-fated Amstrad E-mailer – an early 2000s landline phone that featured a basic monitor and limited internet connectivity.

Liverpool is the most talked-about UK city on social media

We have to fudge the figures a little to make this claim accurate, but in 2019, Liverpool was found to get more mentions on social media than any other British city as a proportion of its population.

Football was only responsible for a quarter of that, with other Scouse selling points like The Beatles also a big reason for the interaction. One panellist discussing the study upon its release credited Liverpool’s social media popularity to the boom the city has enjoyed since its spell as the European City of Culture in 2008.

Liverpool could become the country’s “most digitally connected area”

Just yesterday, Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram announced a £30m deal with a view to the city becoming more digitally connected than any other part of the UK.

Discussing the new LCR Digital Infrastructure Project, Rotheram spoke enthusiastically of wanting Liverpool to spearhead the “fourth industrial revolution” in much the same way as it did with the first.

This resurgent city has all kinds of tech claims to its name, and at Engage Web, we’re excited to be on the periphery of it, and look forward to helping many more local businesses with their internet presence. Why not speak to us to learn how we can help you make an online impact in and around this digitally savvy area?