Meet the Phil-blazer

Sydney-sider Paul Taylor, who started a global social media phenomenon with his simple tribute to Phillip Hughes -- #putoutyourbats, was overcome with emotion at his home on Thursday as the outpouring of good will was quantified in numbers.

As of 10am on Thursday, the number that defines the emotional response was 197,031 mentions of his "putoutyourbats" Twitter hashtag across public digital media since he first tweeted it to @smh at 4.08pm on December 27.

"It exploded," says Taylor, who had refused international requests for interviews until after Hughes's funeral on Wednesday.

But hundreds of photos followed in response, across social networks, evidence that people were copying his simple tribute, their cricket bats photographed at their front doors.

Digital media expert Tiphereth Gloria, who conducted the analysis, says: "This was not manufactured. It was not a brand or a campaign. It was a heartfelt expression of grief and respect by one man, with a beautiful and simple visual message which struck an instant chord."

It is truly global. Of the total #putoutyourbats mentions, 34,228 -- or 17.4 per cent -- came from Australia. But more, almost 70,000 came from the United States, 26,799 from Britain, and more than 20,000 from India. Morocco, with 3035 mentions, accounted for only 1.6 per cent.

The figures for #putoutyourbats are for less than a week. Twitter accounts for 94 per cent of its mentions globally while the rest come from Facebook and Instagram.

Celebrities and brands joined in in huge numbers, Jason Yat-Sen Li put out his father-in-law's bat from 1946. West Indies great Viv Richards posted a picture of his bat. Google Australia added a tribute -- an image of a cricket bat -- on its home page. Even Manchester United laid a bat on the pitch of Old Trafford with the defining hashtag.