State of the Edmonton Twittersphere 2012 – Hashtags & Links

This is the third part in my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2012 – you can read the overview post here (and here is the hashtags & links entry for 2011). As we saw in that entry, local users posted more than 4 million tweets containing links. They also posted nearly 5 million tweets containing hashtags. Let’s take a closer look at what exactly we tweeted about in 2012.

It’s difficult to extract a lot value out of links because everything is trapped behind the t.co wrapper, but I did want to highlight the time of day that links seem to be posted. Recall that the hourly peak for tweet volume in general comes at around 9 PM, whereas for tweets containing links the peak is 11 AM.

Local users used just over 1 million different hashtags in 2012, up from nearly 600,000 in 2011. Hashtags ranged in length from 1 character to 139, excluding the hash, and they were used for just about every purpose you can think of. The average hashtag length was 14 characters.

Here are the top 25 hashtags used by local users in 2012:

Here’s a visualization of the top 100 hashtags excluding #yeg:

The most popular hashtag of all is still #yeg by a long shot. It was used about 660,000 times by local users which works out to 13.4% of all local tweets containing hashtags. The list above also illustrates the prevalence of #yeg-related hashtags. In 2012, local users used more than 4200 of them, up from 3600 last year. Though half of them were used just once, 44 #yeg-related hashtags were used more than 1000 times each.

Here are the top 25 #yeg-related hashtags:

Here’s a visualization of the top 100 #yeg-related hashtags:

I noticed some trends looking at the top 100 hashtags, so I decided to group some tags into topics or categories. I came up with nine that stood out:

Arts – #yegarts, #yegfringe, #yegmusic, #yegtheatre, #yegfilm
Downtown – #yegdt, #yegarena
Education – #abed, #edtech, #ualberta, #epsb
Food – #yegfood, #yegfoodag
Politics – #yegcc, #ableg, #cdnpoli, #abpoli, #yegfed
Regions – #shpk, #sprucegrove, #stalbert, #fortsask, #strathco, #leduc
Sports –#oilers, #nhl, #esks, #cfl, #oilkings
Transportation – #yegtraffic, #yegtransit, #yegbike
Weather – #yegweather, #yegwx, #yegwxfx

Here’s a breakdown of how those categories relate to one another. You can see that we tweet more about politics and sports than arts and education:

Here’s a look at the frequency of each category over the course of the year. This starts to show some interesting variations over the year, most notably in the summer when we experience our nicest weather and the Fringe Festival is taking place:

And here’s that same frequency but highlighting the spikes that took place throughout the year:

I’d love to hear your ideas for what those spikes represent, but here are my guesses for a few of them:

Sports – April 10, 2012 – This was the day the Oilers won the lottery for the first overall draft pick.
Education – June 15, 2012 – This was the day of the HUB Mall shooting.
Sports – June 22, 2012 – This was the day the Oilers selected Nail Yakupov first overall at the 2012 NHL Entry Draft.
Arts – August 17, 2012 – This was the day after the Fringe started and was the day of the Metallica concert.
Downtown – October 17, 2012 – This was the day of the Downtown Arena update (Mandel’s deadline for the Katz Group).
Food – October 26, 2012 – This was the day of the public hearing on the Food & Agriculture Strategy.
Transportation/Weather – November 7, 2012 – This was the day of our first major snowfall.
Politics – December 12, 2012 – This was the day Council voted to re-open negotiations with the Katz Group on the arena.

You might be wondering about the provincial election that took place in April. Well I originally included #abvote in the Politics category, but it skewed the results so dramatically I took it out. Here’s what it the year looks like if you include #abvote:

April 23 was election day, and local users posted more tweets on that day than any other until the snowstorm came along and on November 6 and 7. In addition to those two days, just one other day in 2012 had more tweets than election day and that was December 12 when Council last discussed the arena.

This entry brings my 2012 report to a close. I hope you found it useful – thanks for reading!

2012 in Review

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – Hashtags & Links

This is the third part in my State of the Calgary Twittersphere for 2012 – you can read the overview post here. As we saw in that entry, local users posted more than 5 million tweets containing links. They also posted about 5 million tweets containing hashtags. Let’s take a closer look at what exactly they tweeted about in 2012.

Local users used about 1.1 million different hashtags in 2012. Hashtags ranged in length from 1 character to 139, excluding the hash, and they were used for just about every purpose you can think of. The average hashtag length was 14 characters.

Here are the top 25 hashtags used by local users in 2012:

Here’s a visualization of the top 100 hashtags excluding #yyc:

The most popular hashtag of all is still #yyc, followed by #calgary (#yyc is about 6 times more popular than #calgary). In total, #yyc was used about 600,000 times by local users which works out to 11.9% of all local tweets containing hashtags.

Though not as prevalent in the top 100, local users did use #yyc-related hashtags quite frequently. In total, about 2500 different hashtags were used that start with #yyc. A little more than half of those were used just once, and just 22 were used 1000 times or more.

Here are the top 25 #yyc-related hashtags:

Here’s a visualization of the top 100 #yyc-related hashtags:

This entry brings my 2012 report to a close. I hope you found it useful – thanks for reading!

2012 in Review

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere 2012 – Users & Clients

This is the second part in my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2012 – you can read the overview post here (and here is the users & clients post for 2011). As we saw in that entry, more than 105,000 local users posted at least one tweet in 2012. Let’s take a closer look at users and the tools they used to post tweets.

While a large number of users posted at least one tweet throughout the year, there are fewer users who post something in any given month. Keeping in mind that November is underrepresented in this chart, we can see that October had the most active users at nearly 52,000, and the trend is very clearly going up.

Again I think it is really interesting to look at this data over the longer term. Here’s a look at the growth in monthly active users since I started tracking data in 2009:

There are a small number of really active users, and a much larger number of less active users. In 2012, the top 100 most active users accounted for about 1.5 million or 8.8% of all local tweets (that’s down from 16% in 2011).

Here are the 25 most active users:

Here are the 5 most active bots or automated feeds:

Combined, the top 30 users accounted for about 4.6% of all local tweets (down from 8.3% last year).

Here are the 25 most active users using #yeg:

Here are the 5 most active bots or automated feeds using #yeg:

The top 100 most active users using #yeg and related tags accounted for 1.4% of all local tweets, and 25.8% of all #yeg-tagged tweets, down from 30.3% last year.

Here are the 25 most replied to users (by other local users):

Those 25 users accounted for 8.3% of all local replies, down from 11.2% last year. The top 100 most replied to local users accounted for 2.7% of all local tweets and 18.7% of all local replies (compared to 24.5% last year).

I think the retweet is one of the most valuable metrics on Twitter. Anyone can post a lot, or gain a lot of followers, but to get retweeted by lots of other people you need to be useful/interesting/funny/inspiring/etc. In the past I have just produced one list of the most retweeted users, but this year I decided to separate individuals from organizations.

Here are the 25 most retweeted non-individual users:

Here are the 25 most retweeted individual users:

A total of 59 users were retweeted by other local users 1000 times or more. Just 7 users were retweeted more than 5000 times, and @KikkiPlanet was the only individual in that group. Just like last year, only @EdmontonJournal was retweeted more than 10,000 times.

I did not keep track of the most followed users this year, primarily because the information is readily available elsewhere. If you want to know who the most followed users in Edmonton are, check out Twopcharts.

Clients

More than 3800 different applications and services were used to post tweets in 2012, up slightly from more than 3100 last year. For the first time since I have been tracking stats, the web is no longer the top dog! Here are the top ten:

The top ten clients accounted for 82.9% of all local tweets posted in 2012 (compared to 76.8% last year).

Coming Up

State of the Calgary Twittersphere 2012 – Users & Clients

This is the second part in my State of the Calgary Twittersphere for 2012 – you can read the overview post here. As we saw in that entry, more than 105,000 local users posted at least one tweet in 2012. Let’s take a closer look at users and the tools they used to post tweets.

There are a small number of really active users, and a much larger number of less active users. In 2012, the top 100 most active users accounted for about 1.7 million or 9.0% of all local tweets.

Here are the 25 most active users:

Here are the 5 most active bots or automated feeds:

Combined, the top 30 users accounted for about 5.1% of all local tweets.

Here are the 25 most active users using #yyc:

Here are the 5 most active bots or automated feeds using #yyc:

The top 100 most active users using #yyc and related tags accounted for less than 1.0% of all local tweets, and 24.8% of all #yyc-tagged tweets.

Here are the 25 most replied to users (by other local users):

Those 25 users accounted for 7.2% of all local replies. The top 100 most replied to local users accounted for 1.5% of all local tweets and 15.2% of all local replies.

Here are the 25 most retweeted non-individual users:

Here are the 25 most retweeted individual users:

A total of 44 users were retweeted by other local users 1000 times or more. Just 5 users were retweeted more than 5000 times, and @nenshi was the only individual in that group. Just @calgaryherald was retweeted more than 10,000 times.

I did not keep track of the most followed users this year, primarily because the information is readily available elsewhere. If you want to know who the most followed users in Calgary are, check out Twopcharts.

Clients

More than 4200 different applications and services were used to post tweets in 2012. For the first time since I have been tracking stats, the web is no longer the top dog! Here are the top ten:

The top ten clients accounted for 81.1% of all local tweets posted in 2012.

Coming Up

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere 2012 – Overview

Welcome to the State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2012, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton in 2012. You can see my previous annual recaps here: 2011, 2010, 2009.

I’ve done my best to ensure all of the data in this report is accurate, but I make no guarantees – use it at your own risk. The data comes from the Twitter API, and was collected over the course of 2012. If a user has his or her location set to Edmonton, St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Leduc, Nisku, Stony Plain, Fort Saskatchewan, Beaumont, Spruce Grove, or matching lat/long coordinates, they are considered an Edmontonian, and thus a “local user”.

Please treat the numbers in this report as a minimum. There are instances where I wasn’t able to capture all of the data, and there are certainly users here in Edmonton who do not match the above definition of a “local user”. More important than the raw numbers themselves are the trends, and that’s why in many cases I have presented rounded rather than exact figures. You can click on any graph to see a larger version.

Here are the highlights for 2012:

More than 105,000 local users posted at least one tweet.
About 17 million tweets were posted by local users, which works out to 32.3 tweets per minute (up from 11.2 million tweets and 21.4 tweets per minute last year).
Here’s a breakdown of those tweets:
- Nearly 900,000 tweets were tagged #yeg or a related hashtag (5.3%, down from 6.4% last year)
- More than 850,000 tweets were retweets (5.1%, down from 6.2% last year)
- About 6.5 million tweets were replies (38.8%, down from 39.4% last year)
- Just under 2.4 million tweets were replies to other local users (14.2%, down from 15.2% last year)
- About 4 million tweets contained links (23.3%, down from 22.9% last year)
- Nearly 5 million tweets contained hashtags (28.9%)
- More than 400,000 tweets were twooshes (a twoosh is exactly 140 characters) (2.5%, down from 2.9% last year)

When the year started, Edmontonians were posting about 1.2 million tweets per month. While the growth over the course of the year was less dramatic than in years past, the trend was clearly up. Please note that November shows a dip but that was due to issues with my system, and does not reflect a sudden drop in activity. October was the busiest month we’ve had in terms of tweet volume, with a little over 1.7 million tweets posted.

The day with the most tweets posted was November 7. A quick scan of the headlines shows that was the day of our major snowfall that caused all kinds of issues for Edmontonians, and clearly they took to Twitter to talk about it. A little over 50 tweets per minute were posted that day, and the number of local replies to one another was twice the average.

Roughly 47.5% of all local tweets were posted between the hours of 9 AM and 6 PM, which is down a little from 49.1% last year. The fewest tweets are posted around 4 AM, and the peak comes at around 9 PM.

Looking at days of the week, it turns out that Wednesday had the most tweets posted followed closely by Tuesday, with Monday being having the fewest. This is more or less the same as last year, when Wednesday was also the highest and Sunday was the lowest.

Looking at the stats by year is great, but it is the longer-term view that is most interesting. Here’s a look at the number of tweets posted per month since I started tracking back at the beginning of 2009:

When I built my tracking system at the end of 2008 there were very few users and very few tweets being posted each month. I have maintained and improved it over the last few years, and thankfully Twitter’s API has become incredibly stable. But the original design/approach has reached some limits. So with that in mind, I built a new system over the holidays that I will soon be launching at ShareEdmonton so that you can see this information in near real-time. It may not be as complete initially, but I will improve it over the course of the year. Stay tuned!

Coming Up

In order to make it easier to produce and consume this report, I have decided to break it into sections. This entry provided an overview, and upcoming entries will focus on different aspects of Twitter usage in Edmonton:

If you have any questions about this information, please leave a comment below!

State of the Calgary Twittersphere 2012 – Overview

Welcome to the State of the Calgary Twittersphere for 2012, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary in 2012. While I have kept up with the stats for Edmonton, I haven’t posted anything about Calgary since my last monthly post way back in September of 2010. That post looked at the statistics for July 2010, when just 10,500 local users posted a tweet. Twitter has grown significantly since then, and so has the community in Calgary.

I’ve done my best to ensure all of the data in this report is accurate, but I make no guarantees – use it at your own risk. The data comes from the Twitter API, and was collected over the course of 2012. 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, and thus a “local” user.

Please treat the numbers in this report as a minimum. There are instances where I wasn’t able to capture all of the data, and there are certainly users here in Calgary who do not match the above definition of a “local user”. More important than the raw numbers themselves are the trends, and that’s why in many cases I have presented rounded rather than exact figures. You can click on any graph to see a larger version.

Here are the highlights for 2012:

More than 105,000 local users posted at least one tweet.
More than 19 million tweets were posted by local users, which works out to 36.6 tweets per minute.
Here’s a breakdown of those tweets:
- Nearly 700,000 tweets were tagged #yyc (3.6%)
- Just over 900,000 tweets were retweets (4.7%)
- Almost 7 million tweets were replies (35.5%)
- Almost 2 million tweets were replies to other local users (9.9%)
- More than 5 million tweets contained links (26.2%)
- More than 5.1 million tweets contained hashtags (26.6%)
- More than 400,000 tweets were twooshes (a twoosh is exactly 140 characters) (2.3%)

When the year started, Calgarians were posting about 1.5 million tweets per month. That number remained relatively constant throughout the year, though there was a big jump in October to more than 1.8 million (and November appears lower than it should in this report due to issues with the data collection).

Roughly 47.8% of all local tweets in 2012 were posted between the hours of 9 AM and 6 PM. The fewest tweets were posted at about 4 AM, and there’s a visible spike in volume at around 9 PM.

Looking at days of the week, it turns out that Tuesday and Wednesday saw the most tweets posted, with Monday having the fewest (though there isn’t much of a difference compared to the rest of the week).

Though I have been recording stats for Calgary since 2009, I haven’t looked at the data in quite some time, so this was an interesting exercise. Comparing the data to last year’s report for Edmonton (and this year’s, which will be posted soon) gives you a sense of how much Twitter usage in Calgary has grown.

Coming Up

I have decided to break this report into sections to make it easier to produce and consume. This entry provided an overview, and upcoming entries will focus on different aspects of Twitter usage in Calgary:

Thanks for reading!

How I travelled in 2012

Lattes weren’t the only thing I decided to track in 2012! I also decided to track how I much I travelled over the course of the year. One reason I wanted to do so was simply for my own knowledge! I think if you really want to change something, you need to first measure it. I figured if I could compare how often I drive with how often I choose other methods, I might be more inclined to change my behavior. Another reason was to hopefully inspire others to look at their own habits.

Cars, buses, LRT, and good old fashioned walking! Photo by Darren.

I used a few tools to track this information. First, my Fitbit, which tracks how many steps I take each day. Second, I took advantage of the data I have been tracking for years about my driving habits. And finally, I recorded everything else in DAYTUM. To get distances, I would use Google Maps or this handy calculator. I use TripIt for all my out-of-town trips, so that’s where I got the flight distances.

Here’s what the overall distance data looks like:

TYPE	DISTANCE (KM)
Airplane	34642.0
Bicycle	16.4
Bus	392.4
Ferry	5.7
LRT	207.5
Shuttle	55.4
Streetcar	17.1
Subway	1.0
Tube	110.9
Vehicle	6951.1
Walking	2043.1

No surprise there – I travelled further by airplane than any other mode of transportation. I flew to Toronto, Portland, Kamloops, London, Dublin, and Miami in 2012.

What’s more interesting is comparing how I got around Edmonton and the other cities I visited:

I suppose including the steps distance in that is a bit misleading, because walking around the house or office is included in that total, but there’s no easy way to break it out. Regardless, I think that chart more or less illustrates how I get around Edmonton. If a destination is in walking distance (about 20 minutes or so), I’ll generally walk. If it is far away, I’ll probably drive. For everything in between, I try to take transit.

If I could do it again, I would have tracked the # of trips in addition to distance (I have started doing that for 2013). I didn’t track how many times I used the car to get around Edmonton, for instance. I did track bus & LRT trips though, because I had to enter all that data into DAYTUM. In total in 2012, I made 141 trips using public transit:

Tracking the amount I walk has absolutely been motivating. There were lots of times that I tried to walk a bit more, just to get over 10,000 or whatever milestone I was close to. According to my Fitbit, I did 2,835,849 steps in 2012, covering a total distance of 2043.1 KM. That works out to an average of 7749 steps and 5.6 KM per day. Here’s what it looks like on a chart:

I did more than 30,000 steps on June 9 (which was the day of Al Fresco) and more than 25,000 once more on August 26 (which was the tour of the Northeast farms and Blink). I did more than 20,000 steps five times and more than 10,000 steps seventy-four times. My laziest day was Boxing Day when I did just 1860 steps (clearly, we stayed home).

Recording all of this data has definitely caused me to think about my habits more, and my lack of cycling stands out. If I had a bicycle, I could probably replace a number of the car trips that are either too far for walking or too inconvenient to wait for the bus. I really loved cycling when we were in Portland, so I think I will definitely try to do more of it here in Edmonton this year!

I probably drank too much coffee in 2012

I drink a lot of coffee. I start my day with a mug or two of freshly ground and brewed coffee, usually black. A couple times a week and especially in the winter, I’ll also have a Starbucks Via in the evening, though I have been trying to drink more tea instead. On top of all that, I drink a lot of lattes. I generally don’t make new year’s resolutions, but I do like to try new things each year. For 2012, I decided I would dive further into the world of self-tracking. Using the free and wonderful DAYTUM, I tracked each latte I drank throughout the year. Here’s what that data looks like.

Credo Coffee on 4th Street Promenade

In total, I drank 120 lattes in 2012. I did my best to record diligently and while I’m sure I missed a few, that’s probably fairly accurate. That’s an average of 2.3 lattes per week. If I had purchased each one myself at an average of $5 (thankfully I didn’t, others often buy me coffee) that would be $600 over the year.

Here are my top ten lattes by number consumed:

Credo Vanilla Latte (46)
Starbucks Caramel Macchiato (12)
Starbucks Cinnamon Dolce Latte (10)
Starbucks Eggnog Latte (7)
Credo Iced Vanilla Latte (5)
Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte (5)
Roast Vanilla Latte (4)
Transcend Vanilla Latte (4)
Latte (3)
Second Cup Caramel Corretto (3)

Plot everything on a graph, and you get a long tail:

The other thing I can do with the data is look at my consumption over the year:

And I can see which days of the week I was most likely to indulge on:

I plan to keep tracking this data throughout 2013, so it’ll be interesting to compare at this time next year.

My first latte of 2013!

Though it seems like a lot of lattes, I’m not sure I necessarily want to cut back. Many of those lattes represent an opportunity to sit down and chat with someone, and that’s something I am not ready to give up!

Edmonton in 2012

It’s that time of year when pretty much all the news being published is in list form! I figured I’d try once again to pull some Edmonton lists and year-in-review articles together into a single place. I’ll keep adding to it as I find more, so let me know what I have missed!

From the University of Alberta: the top 10 stories of 2012 and the year in photos. And here’s the top ten research stories of the year.
Homicides were a big story in 2011 but not this year: Edmonton homicide numbers plunge in 2012 following an ‘anomaly’ year in 2011.
Here’s a recap of 2012’s top local stories from CBC. They also did an end-of-year interview with EPS Chief Rod Knecht.
Here are the top stories of 2012 published by GigCity. They also have the top 10 Edmonton albums of 2012, and an article looking at the good, the bad, and the wickedly sweet in literature. Oh, and don’t forget to vote for the Edmontonian of the Year.
Here is the Edmonton Journal’s year-in-review (look at the links in the “more on this story” section). Highlights include the reporters’ favorite stories, the photographers’ top pictures, and the readers’ favorite stories. They also did a number of “Best of 2012” articles: Favorite Outings, Dining Out, Top CDs (people still buy CDs?), Favorite Books, Favorite TV Shows, Favorite Movies, Pop Culture.
Also from the Journal: 2012 a year to celebrate a city of diversity and style.
From the Edmonton Sun, we have a number of “pictures of the year” articles: Amber Bracken, Tom Braid, Perry Mah, Ian Kucerak, David Bloom, and Codie McLachlan.
Here’s a list of the top ten Edmonton concerts of 2012.
Even with the lockout, the Edmonton Oilers were very active on Twitter in 2012.
Global has a pretty expansive 2012 Year in Review site, though it’s mostly non-local. Here in Edmonton they have a poll for the top local story of the year. They also sat down with Chief Knecht and Mayor Mandel.
Michael has started a music-focused 2012 List of Lists.
Dave Cournoyer is looking ahead at what 2013 holds for Alberta politics. David Climenhaga thinks it could be a big year for Alberta’s NDP.
I really enjoyed looking at Cathy’s 2012 photo essay.
The Edmonton Chamber of Commerce did a series of blog posts looking at the top ten Edmonton news stories of 2012. Check the related posts for previous headlines.
Here’s a look at FC Edmonton’s “awful” 2012 season, and here’s a look back at the 2012 Edmonton Rush.
Here are Metro’s top web stories of 2012.
Startup Edmonton posted a report to the community for 2012.
In case you missed them: Avenue Edmonton’s Top 40 Under 40 for 2012, and VUE Weekly’s Best of Edmonton 2012.
Here’s a great year-in-review in photos by Jason Franson.
From Laurie of Retro-Reporter, a 2012 in review post.
Kikki Planet decided to post a personal retrospective of the top ten lessons of 2012. Jen also did a personal look back at 2012. Here is Kyle’s look back.
Maurice has highlighted some of the year’s biggest political bloopers.
Here are the top ten most viewed posts on my blog over the past year.
Here is Sharon’s look back at the year in food and here are her personal culinary highlights.
Metro posted their best photos of 2012.
From Jason Foster, 2012: The Beer That Was.
Here is what 2012 meant to Gluten Free Edmonton.
Here are DECL’s Top 10 Highlights of 2012.
Here is my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2012.

The Edmonton Journal also did a 2012 Year-in-Review video:

Here are some other links related to Edmonton in 2012:

Sports: Edmonton Oilers, Edmonton Eskimos, Edmonton Rush, FC Edmonton, Edmonton Indy
News Releases: City of Edmonton, Edmonton International Airport.
Budget 2013

Fireworks downtown for New Year’s Eve 2011 by Blair Haggerty

Happy New Year!

Tag: 2012

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere 2012 – Hashtags & Links

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – Hashtags & Links

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere 2012 – Users & Clients

State of the Calgary Twittersphere 2012 – Users & Clients

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere 2012 – Overview

State of the Calgary Twittersphere 2012 – Overview

How I travelled in 2012

I probably drank too much coffee in 2012

Top 10 Posts for 2012

Edmonton in 2012

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