State of the Calgary Twittersphere – October 2009

By Mack D. Male · November 13, 2009 at 9:30am

Welcome to the eighth State of the Calgary Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary. You can see last month’s stats here.

The source of the data this month is the same as last, primarily Twitter Search but also from Twitter directly. If a user has his or her location set to Calgary, Airdrie, Okotoks, Cochrane, Strathmore, or matching lat/long coordinates, they are considered a Calgarian. If a tweet is “about Calgary” it contains either the word Calgary, the #yyc hashtag, or both.

For October 2009:

# of local users: 7283 (an increase of 139 from September)

To clarify, that means there were 7283 users who posted at least one tweet in October 2009 with their location set to something that makes them an Calgarian as described above. This number should be treated as a minimum – there are probably many more Calgary users without their location set or that were not captured for some other reason.

Here are the rest of the stats for October 2009:

# of tweets by local users: 298538
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc or #calgary: 7464 (2.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 88740 (29.7%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 84794 (28.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 20120 (6.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 9133 (3.1%)

I’ve heard that some folks in Calgary use #yyc while others use #calgary, so I decided to do the stats for both this month. Of the 7464 total tagged tweets, just 934 of them used #calgary. Of those, just 381 did not also include #yyc.

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

New stat this month! Here are the ten users who posted the most locally tagged tweets (#yyc, #yyctraffic, #Calgary, etc.; most tweets first): Karaokeworld, a_picazo, C_DIG, SECalgaryNews, aldjohnmar, cityofcalgary, stuartrcrawford, BT_Calgary, that_angela, donnamct
The ten most active local users (most tweets first, with a few bots removed): ProtruckR, Gengenw, workmanrw, scottmiller777, izzynobre, kiambas, Kristinnuendo, CalgaryCP, SalBarguil, a_picazo
The ten most replied to local users (most replied to first): that_angela, C_DIG, Eves1, carmenincalgary, ang_J, alex_ruiz, ReaFaceToFace, myownbiggestfan, gotkube, DarciCollier
Just under 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 6.7 tweets per minute in October, compared with 6.1 per minute in September.
The day with the most local tweets posted was October 28th at 11472. On average, 9630 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 8722 in September).
Of the 88740 replies posted by local users this month, 21100 or 23.8% were to other local users.
A total of 1215 users posted 50 times or more in October. In comparison, 1216 users posted just once.

Final Thoughts

User growth was less than Edmonton this month, which doesn’t happen very often! The number of tweets posted by local users is still on the rise, however. There were 5 days in October with more than 11,000 local tweets posted.

Since March, I have identified just over 16,200 local users. The number above, 7283, is how many of them were active in October.

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – September 2009

By Mack D. Male · October 15, 2009 at 9:30am

Welcome to the seventh State of the Calgary Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary. You can see last month’s stats here.

For September 2009:

# of local users: 7144 (an increase of 292 from August)

To clarify, that means there were 7144 users who posted at least one tweet in September 2009 with their location set to something that makes them an Calgarian as described above. This number should be treated as a minimum – there are probably many more Calgary users without their location set or that were not captured for some other reason.

Here are the rest of the stats for September 2009:

# of tweets by local users: 261665
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 5867 (2.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 80182 (30.6%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 67306 (25.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 11788 (4.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 7812 (3.0%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

The ten most active local users (most tweets first): kairocanuck, ProtruckR, larissababe567, CalgaryCP, workmanrw, MrRockNRoll, youthjuice1111, Zarquil, TomAnus2, robertmcbean
The ten most replied to local users (most replied to first): nscafe, kiambas, C_DIG, Eves1, jayincalgary, JohnCornegge, CdnCowgirl, myownbiggestfan, darylcognito, gotkube
Just over 50% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 6.1 tweets per minute in September, compared with 5.5 per minute in August.
The day with the most local tweets posted was September 17th at 10303. On average, 8722 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 7881 in August).
Of the 80182 replies posted by local users this month, 18845 or 23.5% were to other local users.
A total of 1110 users posted 50 times or more in September. In comparison, 1148 users posted just once.

Final Thoughts

I anticipated the user growth for September would have been larger, but at least it’s still going in the right direction! As with Edmonton, the number of tweets being posted by local users is on the rise – there were seven days this month with over 10000 tweets posted.

Since March, I have identified just over 15,300 local users. The number above, 7144, is how many of them were active in September.

Airport Passenger Statistics for Edmonton & Calgary

By Mack D. Male · June 24, 2009 at 11:50pm

Earlier this evening I was a guest on The Lesley Primeau Show on 630 CHED. Along with Brittney, we talked about Twitter. That went pretty much as expected – Lesley doesn’t hate social media, but she doesn’t get it either.

While waiting for the show to get started, we were talking about the Edmonton City Centre Airport (ECCA). I’m in favor of closing “the muni” while Lesley very clearly favors the status quo, or perhaps even restoring scheduled service to ECCA. She feels that Edmonton needs an airport downtown to become a great city – I think we need density in the centre, not an airport.

Things got slightly heated when Lesley said that the only growth the Edmonton International Airport (EIA) has seen was from the consolidation back in 1995. She also said that EIA will never rival the Calgary International Airport, and that growth there has been far stronger. I challenged her on both of these assertions (and have heard others make them recently). Lesley said I needed to do my homework, that I was wrong.

So I did my homework. I wasn’t wrong.

Let’s start with the first myth – that EIA’s growth has only come at the expense of ECCA. Here are the annual passenger numbers for each airport from 1995 to 2008 (I’m going with scheduled passenger numbers, which is why ECCA is 0 after 1996):

Here they are in table format:

YEAR	EIA	ECCA
1995	1943797	835612
1996	3104322	417002
1997	3720623	0
1998	3791574	0
1999	3700016	0
2000	3843321	0
2001	3940416	0
2002	3773800	0
2003	3882497	0
2004	4081565	0
2005	4511451	0
2006	5213992	0
2007	6065117	0
2008	6437334	0

What can learn from those numbers? The key years are 1995-97, obviously (the plebiscite vote took place on October 16, 1995). Passenger traffic at EIA, which had been stagnant since the early 1980s at about 2 million passengers per year, increased by more than the amount that passenger traffic at ECCA decreased. Passenger traffic at ECCA decreased by 835,612 from 1995 to 1997, while passenger traffic at EIA increased by 1,776,826.

Clearly there was something besides consolidation that caused traffic at EIA to increase. Growth at EIA leveled off from 1998 until 2002, but you’ll recall that was a difficult time for the airline industry – Edmonton was not alone.

Now let’s look at the second myth – that Edmonton will always be second to Calgary. Here are the annual passenger numbers for EIA and YYC from 1996 to 2008:

Here they are in table format:

YEAR	EIA	YYC
1996	3104322	6967571
1997	3720623	7547156
1998	3791574	7731034
1999	3700016	8010883
2000	3843321	8090426
2001	3940416	7794519
2002	3773800	7884194
2003	3882497	8576541
2004	4081565	9174039
2005	4511451	10148718
2006	5213992	11279080
2007	6065117	12265754
2008	6437334	12507111

Calgary is definitely busier than Edmonton – nearly twice as busy. Edmonton is in a better position today relative to Calgary than it was in 1996, however. It’s a little difficult to tell from the graph/table above, but Edmonton’s growth overall since 1996 is actually stronger than Calgary’s. Here are the annual percentage increases:

In total, passenger traffic at EIA has increased 107% since 1996, whereas passenger traffic at YYC has increased 80% since 1996.

Is that enough to suggest that Edmonton can emerge from the shadow of Calgary, at least when it comes to their respective airports? Maybe, maybe not. But the data clearly shows that YYC isn’t light years beyond EIA as some would like to suggest.

As an aside, while doing my research I found statistics for EIA for three more years: 394000 in 1962, 755000 in 1973, and 1100000 in 1974.

The public hearing on the City Centre Airport continues tomorrow at City Hall. You can see my resources post here.

Sources: EIA Website, EIA Passenger Statistics, YYC Website, Calgary Airport Statistics, numerous EIA press releases, Wikipedia, Tourism Calgary.

DemoCampCalgary10 & National Digital Media Day

By Mack D. Male · September 26, 2008 at 5:00pm

Yesterday afternoon I made my way down to Calgary for DemoCampCalgary10. I went to their BarCamp in June, but before last night had never attended a DemoCamp there. I was happy to see some familiar faces and meet some new people also. In a way DCC10 was like a mini-tweetup, as there were quite a few Calgary twitterers in attendance! Appropriately, I put “@mastermaq” on my nametag. It was great to catch up with everyone.

There were four demos. The first was SpeakLike (didn’t catch the presenter’s name) which is some sort of translation service and software. Their demo didn’t really work, so it’s hard to say anything about it. Next up was Kent from AllianceOne. They are building a cell phone plan management system for businesses. Third was Marcus from SharingBooks, a way for the authors of children’s books to publish faster. The final demo was Matt from Curve Dental. They are working on new clinical software for dentists. I didn’t find any of the demos very strong, but I’d say Matt’s was the best because he actually demoed how the software works (despite the fact that he started with a slide!).

Yesterday was also the first ever National Digital Media Day. The goal is to raise the profile of the digital media industry. Lots of events were planned all across Canada, and DemoCamp was Calgary’s. You can find out more about NDMD at I Refresh For Content.

Here are my photos from DemoCampCalgary 10. The next DemoCamp in Calgary will take place on October 23rd.