Tag: microblogging

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – May 2009

Welcome to the fifth State of the Edmonton Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton. You can see last month’s stats here. Apologies for posting this so far into June, but my travelling over the last few weeks made it difficult to do. Better late than never!

The source of the data this month remains the same – Twitter Search. 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. If a tweet is “about Edmonton” it contains either the word Edmonton, the #yeg hashtag, or both.

For May 2009:

# of local users: 4513 (an increase of just 24 users over April, see analysis below)

To clarify, that means there were 4513 users who posted at least one tweet in May 2009 with their location set to something that makes them an Edmontonian as described above. This number should be treated as a minimum – there are probably many more Edmonton users without their location set.

# of tweets by local users: 197713
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 10709 (5.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 72789 (36.8%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 34315 (17.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 8833 (4.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 7804 (3.9%)

Once again, the number of tweets containing #yeg actually includes all local hashtags, such as #yegtransit or #yegfood (though most often they are used together anyway).

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the number of local users created per day in May, using the best available data from Twitter (it seems to be really unreliable, I will probably drop this stat next month):

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too):

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • The ten most active local users (most tweets first): akomuzikera, wickedmickey, DebraWard, Etown_Jenn, TrinaMLee, fcedmonton, AndyGroenink, paulagroenink, Sirthinks, SheilaEthier.
  • Just over 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 4.4 tweets per minute in May, compared with 4.3 per minute in April.
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was May 26th at 8190, a new record for Edmonton. On average, 6378 local tweets were posted each day (compared with 6134 in April).
  • Of the 72789 replies posted by local users this month, 26670 or 37% were to other local users.
  • A total of 837 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 812 local users posted just once this month.

Here are the ten most replied to local users for May: britl, akomuzikera, foomanizer, Sirthinks, ZoomJer, bingofuel, angelzilla, mzflip82, frostedbetty, JodieGiese.

Analysis

It looks as though Twitter growth in Edmonton has come to a halt – the number of users who posted something this month only increased by 24 over last month! Clearly more than 24 local users signed up for Twitter last month, however. I think what’s actually happening is that a sizeable number of local users have abandoned Twitter.

There were 1387 users who posted at least one tweet in May that did not post a tweet in April (so presumably they are new). Likewise, there were 1306 users who posted at least one tweet in April that did not post a tweet in May (so presumably they abandoned the service). The difference is larger than 24 because I have better information about the April stats than I did a month ago, but for simplicity, I compare above to the number from last month’s post.

In total, I have identified nearly 7000 local users since January – the number above, 4513, is how many of them are currently active.

I’ll be posting the May stats for Calgary in the next couple days. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: You can see the Calgary stats for May here.

The Edmonton City Centre Airport debate on Twitter

Edmontonians have been debating the future of the Edmonton City Centre Airport (the “Muni”) for years. With a “final” decision expected next month, the amount of discussion has definitely increased lately. As part of my own research into the subject, I turned to Twitter. I’d like to share with you what I found.

I started with a data set consisting of all tweets posted by local users in 2009 that contained either the word “airport”, the hashtag #ecca, or both. From January 1st until May 11th, a total of 852 tweets matched that criteria. Next, I narrowed that data set down to tweets specifically about the City Centre Airport. I ended up with 225 tweets in total. Obviously this data set doesn’t include all tweets that might be about the airport, but I’d say it’s fairly representative.

The first thing I wanted to look at was the general sentiment among local Twitter users. Should the airport be closed or not? This required manually looking at each of 225 tweets and making a judgment call. To clarify, here’s an example of each:

  • Pro-Airport: “dmac666: ATCO: We need the airport,  #ECCA keeps edmonton competitive. #yeg http://tinyurl.com/cusb9f”
  • Pro-Closure: “eglinski: Shut down the Edmonton City Centre Airport. Please. #yeg #citycentreairport #ABLeg”
  • N/A: “Carywill: Anyone know if there are websites that present the case for closing of #citycenterairport? #yeg”

Here’s what I found:

Anecdotally, these results seem accurate. The debate seems fairly balanced in the media and “on the street” in that there are roughly equal numbers on either side, so it should be that way on Twitter too.

Next, I looked at the quantity of tweets per month:

As you can see there was a big jump in April, and I suspect May will be close when all is said and done. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a drop off in July.

Next, I wanted to know what people were linking to. There were 57 links inside the 225 tweets in the data set. Here are the top destinations:

Curiously, there weren’t many blogs in the results. I wonder if that will start to change?

Finally, here are the top ten tweeters (most tweets first): Carywill, dmac666, DebraWard, journalistjeff, AB_get_rich, davecournoyer, CityofEdmonton, michaeljanz, jdarrah, edmontonjournal.

Interesting data? Maybe. The ability to explore sentiments regarding local issues is of particular interest to me, and I’m going to look into that further in the months ahead.

Soon I’ll write up what I’ve learned and what my thoughts are on the ECCA issue.

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – April 2009

Welcome to the second 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 remains the same – Twitter Search. 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.

As you’ll see in a couple of the graphs below, Twitter Search was down for just over 3 hours on April 19th (from about 8:48 PM until 11:51 PM MST), so tweets posted during that period of time were not counted.

For April 2009:

# of local users: 5651 (an increase of 52% over March)

To clarify, that means there were 5651 users who posted at least one tweet in April 2009 with their location set to something that makes them a 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.

# of tweets by local users: 196832
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 3107 (1.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 68157 (34.6%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 37838 (19.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 6373 (3.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 7894 (4.0%)

This graph shows these numbers visually:

Here are the number of local users created per day in April, using the best available data from Twitter (the spike is about the time Oprah joined):

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too):

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • The ten most active local users (most tweets first): strategicsense, codsta, Somecitygirl, izzynobre, C_DIG, aNorthernSoul, mrrocknroll, opiatedsherpa, wikkiwild1, caninez
  • About 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 4.6 tweets per minute in April, compared with 3.3 per minute in March.
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was April 22nd at 9163. On average, 6561 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 4760 in March).
  • Of the 68157 replies posted by local users this month, 17250 or 25% were to other local users.
  • A total of 893 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 926 local users posted just once this month.

I’m not including the top ten users by # of followers this month because I haven’t been able to update it yet, and I suspect it hasn’t changed much anyway. Instead, here are the ten “most replied to” local users for April 2009: C_DIG, caninez, Somecitygirl, darylcognito, ReaFaceToFace, djkelly, amacisaac, Wendy, CdnCowgirl, jonincalgary. This stat obviously skews toward the chatty, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

If you have any comments or feedback let me know so that I can improve these statistics in future months. You can see the April 2009 stats for Edmonton here. I should have a Calgary vs. Edmonton stats post up sometime next week.

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – April 2009

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

The source of the data this month remains the same – Twitter Search. 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. If a tweet is “about Edmonton” it contains either the word Edmonton, the #yeg hashtag, or both.

As you’ll see in a couple of the graphs below, Twitter Search was down for just over 3 hours on April 19th (from about 8:48 PM until 11:51 PM MST), so tweets posted during that period of time were not counted.

For April 2009:

# of local users: 4489 (an increase of 31% over March)

To clarify, that means there were 4489 users who posted at least one tweet in April 2009 with their location set to something that makes them an Edmontonian as described above. This number should be treated as a minimum – there are probably many more Edmonton users without their location set.

# of tweets by local users: 184015
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 9815 (5.3%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 65984 (35.9%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 31056 (16.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 7064 (3.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 8118 (4.4%)

To clarify the # of tweets containing #yeg – that number actually includes all the local hashtags that start with #yeg, so it includes #yegfood, #yegtraffic, etc. This is consistent with the stats for previous months, though it made less of an impact before. I’ll try to break out the stats by tag next month.

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the number of local users created per day in April, using the best available data from Twitter:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too):

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • The ten most active local users (most tweets first): AndyGroenink, DebraWard, akomuzikera, TrinaMLee, Edmontonsun, fcedmonton, Etown_Jenn, britl, bingofuel, wickedmickey
  • About 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 4.3 tweets per minute in April, compared with 3.4 per minute in March.
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was April 23rd at 8069. On average, 6134 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 4876 in March).
  • Of the 65984 replies posted by local users this month, 24916 or 38% were to other local users.
  • A total of 808 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 796 local users posted just once this month.

I’m not including the top ten users by # of followers this month because I haven’t been able to update it yet, and I suspect it hasn’t changed much anyway. Also, I hope to have a dynamic list available soon.

Instead, I have a new top ten as suggested by the Social Web Meetup gang (thanks to @britl for letting me know). Here are the ten “most replied to” local users for April 2009: britl, bingofuel, chrislabossiere, citizenfish, Sirthinks, JodieGiese, frostedbetty, angelzilla, mastermaq, Out_Inc. This stat obviously skews toward the chatty, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Tomorrow, I should be posting the stats for Calgary. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Here are the Calgary stats for April 2009.

Twitter Race: Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN Breaking News

As you may have read recently, Ashton Kutcher and CNN are having a light-hearted contest to see who can become the first to amass 1 million followers on Twitter. At the moment, @cnnbrk has 980,761 followers while @aplusk has 980,001. It’s a tight race! If he wins, Ashton has said he will donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity in honor of World Malaria Day, an offer than CNN quickly matched. Electronic Arts, Oprah, and others are getting in on the action now too.

It’s great that some charities will benefit from all of this, because it’s a silly race. Having said that, it’s also a good opportunity for me to write down some thoughts I’ve had over the last few months as more and more celebrities have joined Twitter:

  • If I were TMZ or PerezHilton, I’d be scared to death of Twitter. When celebrities themselves are breaking the stories that the gossip blogs would normally cover, it doesn’t paint a rosy picture for the future of sites that depend on getting the news first. And it’s not like they’re very good at analysis.
  • Related to that, what a great opportunity for celebrities to take back some control over what is said about them! If a negative or untrue rumor hits the net, a celebrity can post a tweet about it immediately to clear things up. Not to say that celebrities are honest 100% of the time, but you get the idea. Posting to an official website just isn’t the same as directly tweeting half a million engaged followers, who will in turn spread the word.
  • I think this’ll humanize some celebrities. I’m sure they all use Facebook, but we can’t be their friends or see their activity there. With Twitter, anyone can see whatever a celebrity posts. They don’t get anything special – they have the same account as everyone else.

As for the race, I hope Ashton wins. He’s becoming a sort of celebrity ambassador for the web and all of the cool things people are doing with it. For instance:

[Larry] King has invited Kutcher to appear on his show, "Larry King Live." Kutcher, saying "this is a saga for the Internet," asked King to come on his Internet show to settle things.

Among other things, he’s the Creative Director for VoIP startup Ooma, and he continues to experiment with online video through his company Katalyst Media. Who knows if any of his projects will be successful, but the fact that he’s out there experimenting and paying attention to what’s coming next is encouraging.

Apparently @Oprah’s first tweet will be tomorrow when Ashton is on her show. I’m interested to see what she does with the service.

What do you think? Do you care about celebrities on Twitter? By the way, CelebrityTweet is a site that tracks celebs on Twitter.

UPDATE (~12:15 AM MST): Ashton did it, he beat CNN to 1 million followers!

Twitter lovers: watch out for baseball bats!

I was in the mainstream media here in Edmonton twice today for Twitter-related stories. Basically, the local media’s love affair with Twitter continues! First up, Metro Edmonton (@metroedmonton). They asked me about politicians on Twitter, and specifically about Councillor Don Iveson, who I encouraged to join the service. Here’s my quote:

“It shows that governments are in the know, connected and paying attention to what people are passionate about,” said Edmonton tech guru Mack Male (@mastermaq). “Right now, young people seem to be big on Twitter.”

I was responding to the possibility that Councillor Iveson and others may use Twitter as a way to connect with a younger demographic. I think that’s totally possible, and I expect we’ll hear more about that at ChangeCamp. I think it’s great that Don has joined, and that it’s actually him tweeting.

Secondly today, I was a guest on CBC’s Wildrose Country phone-in program (@WRoseCBC). They were interested in my recent live tweeting of an Edmonton Symphony Orchestra event. One of the people who called in was ‘Bob’. He thought my tweeting was entirely disrespectful and said:

“mastermaq should be hit in the head with a baseball bat!”

I’m not sure why he felt the need to be so violent, but his reaction isn’t entirely surprising. Many people are afraid of social media because they don’t understand it, and they react accordingly. On air, I advised Bob and others like him not to focus on the individual, potentially meaningless tweets in isolation, but to recognize that once aggregated together, there’s incredible value in the noise that Twitter facilitates. It’s going to happen (helping you make sense of the clutter), whether Bob likes it or not. In the meantime, tweet away!

I also feel that the “disrespectful” feeling about tweeting is largely a generational thing that will change over time. I could be wrong about that, but I don’t think so. If everyone is used to others texting in a variety of situations, it’s no longer odd or abnormal. Perceptions will then fall in line.

I’m guessing that CBC will post the segment online, but I’m not sure – check the website for details. I’ll update this post with a link if they do.

Thanks to everyone who listened and sent me encouraging comments this afternoon during the CBC segment. I have to admit that having Bob on the show made the discussion a bit more interesting, and if that’s what it takes to get Twitter more accepted and into the mainstream, I say bring it on.

Just watch out for crazy people with baseball bats!

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – March 2009

Welcome to the first State of the Calgary Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary. After receiving many requests for this from Calgarians after my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere posts, combined with my own curiosity, I figured it was time to do some stats for Calgary. I only captured half of the data for March 1st, but otherwise I think these numbers are fairly solid.

Using Twitter Search, I collected anything posted by Calgarians, or about Calgary. 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 March 2009:

# of local users: 3717

To clarify, that means there were 3717 users who posted at least one tweet in March 2009 with their location set to something that makes them a 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.

# of tweets by local users: 147549
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 2936
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 51721
# of tweets by local users containing links: 28902
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 4463
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 5821

This graph shows these numbers visually:

Though perhaps a little inaccurate, here are the best numbers I could get from Twitter for the number of local users created per day during March:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too):

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • The ten most active local users (most tweets first): codsta, wikkiwild1, strategicsense, yuki_hime, izzynobre, darylcognito, pigazine, MitchyD, dblacombe, devlind
  • About 54% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 3.3 tweets per minute in March.
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was March 31st at 6518. On average, 4760 local tweets were posted each day.
  • Of the 51721 replies posted by local users this month, 14650 or 28% were to other local users.
  • A total of 693 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 542 local users posted just once this month.

And finally, the top ten users in Calgary (as of April 11th) by # of followers: douglasi, MarkIsMusing, tessaru, VeerUpdate, nolanmatthias, strategicsense, codsta, dayhomemama, scrawforditm, CalgaryRealtor.

I may put together another post to compare Edmonton and Calgary, but in general I’d say that although Calgary seems to have more users, they don’t seem as connected to one another as Edmontonians are (as evidenced by the # of tagged tweets and replies to other local users). I’m a little surprised that #yeg is so much more active than #yyc, actually.

Thanks to @andrewmcintyre for helping me with these stats (he ranked #13 on the most active users for the month btw). If you have any comments or feedback let me know so that I can improve these statistics in future months.

Edmonton Media Organizations on Twitter – Update 1

Back on March 3rd, I posted a list of local media organizations on Twitter. At that time, there were roughly a dozen organizations with official accounts. It was easier to count the number of organizations using Twitter, than those not using it.

That’s no longer the case.

Here are the local media organizations using Twitter as of April 10th, 2009, by category.

Print

Television

Radio

Of course, these are just the official accounts. For each of these, there are employees and personalities with their own accounts. That list of names is growing ever longer!

So which organizations are missing?

  • 101.7 World FM
  • 105.9 Shine FM
  • 790 CFCW, though there is @stella790cfcw
  • Access TV, though they do have @ABPrimetime
  • AM930 The Light
  • EZ Rock 104.9
  • Magic 99
  • OMNI Edmonton
  • SEE Magazine
  • Shaw TV Edmonton
  • The Team 1260, though there is @CoreyGraham

Some of these organizations may never get on Twitter, I suppose.

I think it’s fair to say that we’ve reached critical mass with regards to the local media on Twitter. It’ll be interesting now to see how they use it, especially as more and more Edmontonians join the service.

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – March 2009

Welcome to the third State of the Edmonton Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton. You can see last month’s stats here, but note that I recently discovered a few of the numbers were wrong and I have since updated the post. The two key figures, the number of local users and the number of tweets posted by local users, remain unchanged.

The source of the data this month remains the same – Twitter Search. 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. If a tweet is “about Edmonton” it contains either the word Edmonton, the #yeg hashtag, or both.

For March 2009:

# of local users: 3421 (an increase of 160% over February)

To clarify, that means there were 3421 users who posted at least one tweet in March 2009 with their location set to something that makes them an Edmontonian as described above. This number should be treated as a minimum – there are probably many more Edmonton users without their location set.

# of tweets by local users: 151146
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 6634 (4.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 55234 (36.5%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 24449 (16.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 3701 (2.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 5401 (3.6%)

This graph shows the above numbers compared to the correct numbers from last month:

I think this data is a little inaccurate, but it’s the best I could get from Twitter – here are the number of local users created per day during March:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too):

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • The ten most active local users (most tweets first): britl, fcedmonton, angelzilla, AndyGroenink, bingofuel, TrinaMLee, akomuzikera, grempel, foomanizer, adampatterson
  • About 55% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 3.4 tweets per minute in March, compared with just 1.8 per minute in February.
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was March 20th at 6061. On average, 4876 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 2598 in February).
  • Of the 55234 replies posted by local users this month, 25398 or 46% were to other local users.
  • A total of 668 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 550 local users posted just once this month.

And finally, the top ten users in Edmonton (as of April 1st) by # of followers: Pat_Lorna, mastermaq, LesM, redneckmommy, cleversimon, ianbakewell, melanienathan, babyrumps, revtrev, ctvedmonton

As expected, the number of local users grew even faster this month than last. The local media’s recent love affair with Twitter no doubt has a lot to do with that! I suspect growth will taper off a bit in April, but will still be impressive.

A common request for these stats is to see how Edmonton compares with other cities. Within the next week or so, I’ll be posting the same stats for Calgary, so stay tuned!

Don’t forget to check out EdmontonTweetup4, taking place on April 7th. Hope to see you there!

EdmontonTweetup4 – April 7th

It’s time for another tweetup! Though it has been nearly six months since EdmontonTweetup3, there have been many other events since then, including Twestival. It’s great to see the community using the wiki to organize tweetups of all kinds! Still, it’s nice to have an “official” tweetup every now and then.

Join us a week from now for EdmontonTweetup4:

WHO: Twitterers and the Twitter-curious in Edmonton and area!
WHAT: An event to meet one another in person.
WHERE: Vintage Lounge, 10124 124th Street (map)
WHEN: Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 6:30pm
WHY: Because you’ll have a great time and will meet fascinating people!

Thanks to Brittney (@britl) for helping me get this going. You can follow the @edmontontweetup account for updates.

There are almost 30 people registered on the wiki already! You don’t have to add your name there, but it does help us if we know roughly how many people are attending. You’re welcome to simply drop by though!

If you’re new to Twitter, you might want to read this article I wrote for Connect2Edmonton.

See you there!