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!

Learning about poverty in Edmonton through a simulation

I recently had the opportunity to participate in Edmonton’s first-ever Poverty Simulation. Sponsored by the EPCOR Community Essentials Council (of which I was a member), the simulation was organized by the United Way of the Alberta Capital Region and brought a few dozen community and business leaders together to learn more about the challenges that low-income families in our community face. According the United Way’s Cost Poverty Report 2012:

The cost of poverty in Alberta is between $7.1 and $9.5 billion per year – a monetary cost incurred by us all. But the deeper costs are seen through the lives of those living in poverty, the effects it has on them, their children and families.

The poverty simulation attempts to provide some insight into those deeper costs.

After I arrived I was given a nametag that told me which character I’d be playing. Turns out I would be Diana Duntley for the morning, a 14-year-old girl. After breakfast, we were instructed to find the rest of our family, and to read the package that gave us more information about our particular situation. I was in school but unmotivated, my older brother had dropped out and was in trouble with the law, and my father was now out of the picture leaving my mother without a job but a bunch of bills to pay.

Photo supplied by United Way

Our task was to survive for a month and to get all of our bills paid. To simulate the time, each week took 15 minutes, and each weekend an additional 2 minutes. Services and organizations were setup all around the room – the school, the grocery store, the utility company, the bank, etc. To get from place to place, you often had to surrender a transit ticket, to try to simulate the transportation challenges people face.

I went to school for three of the four weeks (one was a holiday so there was no school) while my brother and mother did their best to try to find ways to pay our bills. My mother managed to get a job, and my brother turned out to be quite adept at getting vouchers and assistance from the services in the room. In the end though, we did not manage to pay all of the bills.

Photo supplied by United Way

The experience was an eye-opening one for me. I think the word most often used by participants to describe how the simulation made them feel was “hopeless”. It’s a simulation, but it really does give some valuable insight into the difficult decisions that those “living on the edge” in our community face each month. Here are the key things I took away from the simulation:

We had no idea where to start, and I suspect many people in our community face that challenge. What’s the best strategy or approach to ensure you can make ends meet? We do have 211 here in Edmonton but unfortunately that did not exist in the simulation. I have been asking people about it ever since, and not many know about it.
The teachers at school spent a significant chunk of their time dealing with issues that had nothing to do with teaching the curriculum. Following up with students for fees, needing to send letters home to parents, etc.
There’s doesn’t always seem to be a lot of support for families who are just barely making it each month. When we think about the less fortunate we often think about shelters, but there’s a whole range of services needed to help the families that are just trying to pay the bills. From the United Way’s Pathways Out of Poverty: “Poverty is not having sufficient resources, capabilities, choices, security, and power necessary to enjoy an adequate standard of living.”
When you spend all of your time and energy of just making sure you have heat or just getting food on the table, there’s no opportunity to ensure the food you’re buying is healthy and nutritious, nor is there any time or money to save for a better future. You’re always dealing with right now, instead of preparing for tomorrow.

I thought the simulation was really well-organized. It was developed by the Missouri Association for Community Action, and it has since been used all around North America. The United Way localized the program to make it fit the Edmonton context, and I expect they will continue to improve and tweak it based on feedback. One suggestion I would make is to try to simulate the transportation challenge more realistically. The cost per ticket is now $3, not $1 as it was in the simulation, but more important is the amount of time it can take to get from place to place. In the room everything is conveniently located close together and close to where everyone lives, but in the real world services may actually be quite far away. Another improvement would be to provide more concrete actions or next steps to the participants. Going through the simulation is great, but what happens next? How can you take action to make a difference?

Me talking to the utility company. Photo by David O.

I wanted to share some of the statistics that everyone who participated in the simulation left with. On education:

Approximately 9000 students drop out of high school each year in Alberta.
40% of adults in Alberta have low literacy skills and 50% of adults have low numeric skills.
Approximately $142 million is incurred annually by the Province of Alberta for high school drop outs (that’s unemployment, lost tax revenue, social assistance, judicial system and health care costs, etc.)
73% of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit students in EPSB do not graduate within the first 3 years of entering Grade 10.
Over 2100 children received food through E4C’s School Lunch program during the 2010/2011 school year.

On income:

As of September 2012, there were 2459 people on the wait list for social housing in the Capital Region.
In 2009, roughly 123,000 people in the Capital Region were living in poverty (using the Statistics Canada measure of Low Income Cut-Off).
Approximately 15,000 individuals were served every month by Edmonton’s Food Bank in 2011.
Approximately 44% of food bank users are under the age of 18.
Three of four children living in poverty come from homes where at least one parent is working.

On wellness:

In Edmonton, there are more than 40 youth gangs which engage in drug related crimes, extortion, and auto theft, among other crimes. Approximately 80% of the people involved in the drug trade in Edmonton are estimated to be 18-30 years old.
In 2011, the Edmonton Police Service responded to 6292 reported cases of domestic violence.
One in five people in our community will likely experience a mental illness in their lifetime.
The Capital Region is the second largest growth area for government-related services, and 211 has experienced a 10.2% increase in call volume recently.

And finally, here are a few related statistics provided by the Edmonton Social Planning Council:

The average weekly cost of a nutritious food basket for a family of four in Edmonton has increased by 6.6% from $186.88 in April 2010 to $198.93 in April 2012.
Average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Edmonton has increased by 4.2% from $994 in April 2010 to $1,036 in April 2012.
The cost of water, heat and electricity in Edmonton has increased by 12.4% in the two years between 2009 and 2011.
The cost of a monthly bus pass has increased by 11.1% from $75.25 in January 2010 to $84.65 today.
The cost of regular unleaded gasoline in Edmonton has increased by 28.7% from 87.2 cents/litre in June 2010 to 112.2 cents/litre in June 2012.

I understand the United Way will be organizing more simulations in the future, so if you ever get the opportunity to participate I would highly recommend that you do!

You can learn more by reading this post by Karina Hurtado about a poverty simulation that took place recently in Calgary, and this post by ABC Head Start.

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere 2011 – Hashtags & Links

This is the third part in my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2011 – you can read the overview post here. As we saw in that entry, local users posted more than 2.5 million tweets containing links. They also posted more than 3 million tweets containing hashtags. Let’s take a closer look at what exactly we tweeted about in 2011.

Here’s a breakdown of the number of tweets posted per month containing links. As expected, it trends up:

More interesting than the number of links is what those links are for! Of course, most links are hidden behind shortened URLs using a service like TinyURL. That makes it difficult to see the final destination of the link. Additionally, Twitter rolled out its own URL shortener in August which automatically wrapped all links with t.co. So to get a sense of what the links look like, I examined the data from January through August and excluded any t.co wrapped links. That gives us this:

As you can see, bit.ly is by far the most popular URL shortening service. Looking at the top ten, we can see that Tumblr, Facebook, Foursquare, and YouTube account for a large number of the links we post on Twitter every day. So, we use Twitter to link to other social networking sites!

Here are the top ten domains (excluding t.co):

Other popular domains included instagr.am, goo.gl, and dlvr.it.

Perhaps more useful than links for determining what we tweeted about are hashtags. After all, the hashtag was created as a way to “categorize” tweets. In 2011, local users posted more than 3 million tweets containing hashtags. The most commonly used hashtag, by a longshot, was #yeg. Here is a word cloud of the most commonly used hashtags:

Local users used nearly 600,000 different hashtags in 2011. The shortest was just one character, excluding the hash, and the longest was 139 characters. The average hashtag was 14 characters long. There were seven hashtags that filled the full 140 characters of a tweet (when you include the #) and all but one of them had to do with using a long hashtag (the outlier was an extended hey!).

This should give you a sense of the diversity of hashtags used, and also of the prevalence of #yeg:

Removing #yeg from the word cloud allows us to get a better sense of the other top tags:

Here are the top ten hashtags excluding #yeg:

The only one that surprises me there is #customer. I have no idea why that hashtag was so popular! Given that it hasn’t been used recently, I suspect a bot may have helped boost its use at some point throughout the year.

I have always been fascinated by the number of local “subtags” as I call them, or hashtags that start with #yeg. In 2011, local users posted more than 3600 different hashtags that started with #yeg. The average length, excluding the hash, was 11 characters. The longest was 52 characters. Appropriately, it was about the weather – #yegohmygoodnesscantbelievewinterisherehowwillimanage.

Here’s a look at the top #yeg-related hashtags:

Here are the top ten #yeg-related hashtags:

So what did we talk about on Twitter in 2011? The same stuff we talk about everywhere else – food, politics, music, traffic, etc. The list above is pretty similar to the list from 2010, with #yegfood on top and a number of political tags like #yegcc, #yegarena, and #yegfed.

Here’s another way to visualize how popular those ten hashtags were, when compared with all other #yeg-related tags:

And here’s a look at the next most commonly used tags after excluding the top ten:

I imagine #yegdt, #yegmedia, and #yegbiz will all climb the charts in 2012!

2011 in Review

This year I have broken the report into sections:

This entry brings the report to a close. I hope you found it useful. Thanks for reading!

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere 2011 – Users & Clients

This is the second part in my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2011 – you can read the overview post here. As we saw in that entry, more than 46,000 local users posted at least one tweet in 2011, and more than 23,000 were active in December. Let’s take a closer look at users and the tools they used to post tweets.

In my experience the creation date for a user is not always populated, but assuming it is incorrect or missing equally across the year, this chart gives us an indication of when local users signed up for accounts in 2011:

As you can see only March seems to stand out – the number of users created is otherwise fairly evenly distributed across the year.

On to the lists!

Here are the 25 most followed users:

The average local user has 138 followers (compared to 120 last year). A total of 918 users have 1000 followers or more (compared to 420 users last year).

Here are the 25 most listed users:

The average local user has been listed 4 times (compared to 5 times last year).

Here are the 25 most active users:

Here are the 5 most active bots:

Combined those were the top 30 most active users, and they accounted for 8.3% of all local tweets. The top 100 most active users accounted for 16.0% of all local tweets (compared to 18.5% last year).

Here are the 25 most active users using #yeg (and #yeg-related hashtags):

Here are 5 most active bots using #yeg:

The top 100 most active users using #yeg and related tags accounted for 30.3% of all #yeg-tagged tweets, down from 51.8% last year. That suggests that more users are using #yeg! A total of 14,238 users posted at least one tweet tagged with #yeg or a related tag in 2011.

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

Those 25 users accounted for 11.2% of all local replies. The top 100 most replied to local users accounted for 24.5% of all local replies (compared to 32.8% last year).

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

If you ever needed proof that Edmonton is a hockey town, look no further than that list! A total of 38 users were retweeted by other local users 1000 times or more. Just the top 6 users were retweeted more than 4000 times, and just @edmontonjournal was retweeted more than 10,000 times.

I like to say that the “most retweeted” is the most important of all the lists in this post, because the retweet is the social currency of Twitter. If someone retweets you, that means that whatever you posted was important/clever/funny/inspiring/etc enough to share with others.

Clients

More than 3100 different applications and services were used to post tweets in 2011, up from more than 2000 last year. Here are the top ten:

The top ten clients accounted for 76.8% of all local tweets in 2011 (compared to 76.2% last year).

Coming Up

This year I have broken the report into sections:

If you have suggestions for additional parts to the report, I’d love to hear them. Thanks for reading!

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere 2011 – Overview

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

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 2011. 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”.

Here are the highlights for 2011:

More than 46,000 local users posted at least one tweet.
- A little over 1000 of those accounts no longer exist.
More than 11.2 million tweets were posted by local users, which works out to 21.4 tweets per minute.
- That’s 2.3 times as many tweets as were posted in 2010.
Here’s a breakdown of those tweets:
- More than 715,000 tweets were tagged #yeg or a related hashtag (like #yegfood) (6.4%, down from 7.7% last year)
- Nearly 700,000 tweets were retweets (6.2%, down from 7.2% last year)
- More than 4.4 million tweets were replies (39.4%, up from 34.7% last year)
- More than 1.7 million tweets were replies to other local users (15.2%, up from 13.5% last year)
- More than 2.5 million tweets contained links (22.9%, down from 26.9% last year)
- More than 320,000 tweets were twooshes (a twoosh is exactly 140 characters) (2.9%, down from 3.9% last year)

While more than 46,000 local users posted a tweet last year, just under 24,000 were active at the end of the year in December (active means they posted at least one tweet). That’s 1.9 times as many active users as January. That’s slightly better growth than we saw in 2010, when December had 1.8 times as many active users as January.

When the year started, Edmontonians were posting a little over 600,000 tweets per month. By the end of the year, that number had nearly doubled to 1.1 million tweets per month. That’s less than the growth that Twitter as a whole experienced last year (3 times as many tweets were posted as compared to the same point in 2010) but is more or less what we saw in Edmonton in 2010 (as compared to 2009).

Roughly 49.1% of all tweets in 2011 were posted between the hours of 9 AM and 6 PM, down slightly from 50.8% in 2010. Once again the lowest point for tweet volume was around 4 AM. Last year there were clear early morning and late night spikes, but this year only the late night spike is present (8 PM to 11 PM).

There’s a much nicer looking curve for days of the week this year, with the most tweets being posted during the middle of the week. Sunday typically had the lowest volume of tweets posted.

Here’s a look at the number of tweets posted per day for each day of the year. As with last year’s chart, the trend is clearly up, and there are some visible spikes and troughs. The dip on April 9 appears to be an anomaly in the data, perhaps there were issues with the Twitter API that day (unless you have another idea!). The peak on June 15 was not immediately obvious but it turned out after looking at a Wordle of the tweets that the spike was due to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. With nearly 45,000 tweets posted that day, it remained the record until October 25 when discussion about the downtown arena became the talk of Twitter here in Edmonton. More than 46,000 tweets were posted that day, with almost as many being posted on the next two days as well. The spike on November 17 appears to be related to the snow and cold weather that arrived that week.

Coming Up

In order to make it easier for me to write 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 suggestions for additional parts to the report, I’d love to hear them. Thanks for reading!

Edmonton’s population is up 12.1% according to the 2011 Federal Census

Statistics Canada today released the first set of information for the 2011 Federal Census, focused on population and dwelling counts. The population of Canada has increased 5.9% since the 2006 census, compared with 5.4% for the previous five-year period.

Canada’s population increased at a faster rate than the population of any other member of the G8 group of industrialized nations between 2006 and 2011. This was also the case between 2001 and 2006.

Canada’s population now sits at 33,476,688. Looking at the provinces, Alberta leads the country in growth with an increase of 10.8%, taking our population up to 3,645,257, which is about 11% of the country.

Increasingly we are an urban country. A total of 69.1% of the population lives in one of Canada’s 33 census metropolitan areas (CMAs), and that number is going up:

The rate of growth between 2006 and 2011 was 7.4% in CMAs as a group, above the national average of 5.9%. The two fastest growing CMAs were both in Alberta: Calgary, where the population rose 12.6%, and Edmonton, where it increased 12.1%.

Here’s a look at the fastest growing CMAs in the country:

Looking at federal electoral districts in the Edmonton region, Edmonton-Leduc was the fastest growing with 28% growth since 2006 census, followed by Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont at 22%.

Looking at Edmonton more generally, the population of the city now sits at 812,201 while the population of the CMA is now 1,159,869. Here’s the population for the City and the CMA over the last fifteen years:

And here’s the percentage increase over that same time period:

Edmonton is now the sixth largest CMA in the country, and we’re growing more quickly than anticipated.

We’ll have to wait until May 29 to learn more about the age and gender breakdown, September 19 to learn more about households, marital status, and structure types, and October 24 to learn more about language.

The City of Edmonton is conducting another municipal census in April this year, and is looking for 1400 people to act as census workers. You can apply in person at City Hall. You can learn more about the municipal census here.

You can learn more about the 2011 Federal Census here, and also check out The Daily for today.

Twitter statistics for City Council’s vote on the financial framework for the downtown arena

After a long public hearing on Tuesday, City Council yesterday debated the proposed financial framework and ultimately whether or not they wanted to proceed with the downtown arena project. They voted 10-3 in favor of the framework, and also voted to spend $30 million to complete the design to 60%. Here’s my analysis of the the arena-related tweets posted by Edmonton users between 9:30am and 9:30pm.

By graphing the tweets per minute, you can very clearly see the time the vote took place (~3:03pm):

I was curious to know if the things people were tweeting before and after that moment were different. Here’s a word cloud of the tweets prior to the vote:

Caterina was mentioned a lot, which makes sense considering he turned out to be the surprise dealmaker of the day. The other Councillors were mentioned quite frequently too, as myself and others tweeted their comments.

Here’s a word cloud of the tweets posted after the vote:

It’s very interesting that “Edmonton” was tweeted so often after the vote passed. There were a lot of tweets similar to “Edmonton will get a new arena” that were retweeted after the vote. You can also see that “Iveson” was fairly prominent after the vote, reflecting the large number of tweets about his final remarks on the deal.

Other stats:

It was another busy day for tweets in Edmonton with more than 42,000 posted by Edmontonians. That works out to an average of about 30 per minute.
More than 880 users posted at least one arena-related tweet.
On average, 5.0 arena-related tweets were posted per minute between 9:30am and 9:30pm. The peak was 43.
Roughly 14% of the tweets were replies to other users.
Roughly 29% of the tweets were retweets.

Here are the top 20 most active local users (most tweets to least):

Here are the top 20 most retweeted local users (by other local users, most retweeted to least):

I gave Paula a run for her money, but she remained the most retweeted user on the arena issue!

UPDATE: I’m always looking for better ways to analyze tweets. Finding a good, reliable way to do sentiment analysis (are tweets positive or negative) is a challenge, partially because tweets are so short and because they usually include weird entities like hashtags (weird from a natural language processing point-of-view). To analyze the arena-related tweets, I used uClassify’s Sentiment Classifier. Here are the results:

I would say this is pretty much as expected. Tweets before the vote probably expressed less emotion one way or the other. Most people tweeting after the vote seemed happy with the decision Council made.

Twitter statistics for today’s public hearing on the proposed arena deal

I think it’s fair to say that the public hearing on the proposed arena deal was the talk of Twitter in Edmonton today. Here’s my quick analysis of all arena-related tweets posted by Edmonton users today between 9:30am and 9:30pm.

A word cloud of the 4500+ tweets:

Here’s a breakdown of tweets per minute (you can clearly see the lunch and dinner breaks):

Other stats:

Thanks largely to the arena-related tweets, more than 44,000 tweets were posted by Edmontonians today. That works out to an average of about 31 tweets per minute.
More than 800 different users posted at least one arena-related tweet.
On average, 6.3 arena-related tweets were posted per minute between 9:30am and 9:30pm. The peak was 24.
Roughly 17% of the tweets were replies to other users.
Roughly 25% of the tweets were retweets.

Here are the top 20 most active local users (most tweets to least):

Here are the top 20 most retweeted local users (by other local users, most retweeted to least):

Council voted to deal with the issue at 9:30am tomorrow (Wednesday). You can watch or listen live here.

the edmontonian: statistics

When I received the email from Jeff & Sally informing me that the edmontonian would soon be ending, I was shocked. I didn’t see it coming. Yesterday was the final day, and I’m still sad about it! I know they’ll be back at some point, but the edmontonian itself is no more. I’m glad I got to interview the duo about the decision, but I also wanted to do a tribute post of sorts. Fortunately, I knew right away what it should be – statistics!

The following statistics cover the edmontonian from the very first post on June 15, 2009 up to but not including the announcement on August 29, 2011.

Number of posts: 1572
Number of words written: 532,595
Number of comments: 3865

That works out to an average of 2.8 posts per day. Here’s what the breakdown looks like per month:

As you can see they posted slightly more at the beginning and then settled into a steady rhythm. The most posts came in July 2009 (perhaps due to the airport debate) while the fewest came in December 2009. The monthly average was 58.2 posts.

Here’s the breakdown by time of day:

Most entries were posted between 10am and 12pm, with another spike between 3pm and 4pm. A significant number of the edmontonian’s posts were headlines, which Jeff often posted mid-morning, so the graph doesn’t really surprise me. This word cloud shows you just how much of a fixture the headlines were at the edmontonian:

That was generated by including all 1572 post titles. If you remove those two words, you get this word cloud:

I didn’t realize how prominently the time of year was featured until I went through this exercise. It shows up in the tags as well. Very interesting! The average length of a post title was 29 characters or 5 words, with the longest being 30 words (fittingly that post was among the shortest for content, containing only images). This one was also quite long at 28 words.

One of my favorite things about the edmontonian was their willingness to link to other stuff. They linked a lot. In total, they posted 17,416 unique links! Of those, 2217 were links to their own stuff. A significant chunk of the rest went to local media. Here are the domains they linked to more than 100 times:

edmontonjournal.com (3170)
theedmontonian.com (2217)
edmontonsun.com (1551)
cbc.ca (983)
edmonton.ctv.ca (768)
630ched.com (587)
metronews.ca (457)
globaltvedmonton.com (349)
youtube.com (345)
shareedmonton.ca (342)
imdb.com (297)
yeglive.ca (272)
inews880.com (266)
seemagazine.com (241)
twitter.com (238)
vueweekly.com (224)
edmonton.ca (204)
calgaryherald.com (196)
edmontonexaminer.com (191)
facebook.com (181)
thegatewayonline.ca (168)
vancouversun.com (121)
en.wikipedia.org (110)

The average length of a post at the edmontonian was 2109 characters or 399 words. The longest was 2135 words. Here’s what a word cloud of all the post content looks like:

All Edmonton, all the time.

Without a doubt, the edmontonian was good at generating a discussion about the things happening in our city. I think it’s safe to say that a lot of that discussion probably took place off the blog (they’ve posted more than 8500 tweets) but I’m still impressed by the number of comments they amassed (an average of 2.5 per post). I would have loved their numbers during my first three years of blogging! This post had the most comments at 96.

These statistics are interesting, but of course they don’t reflect all the passion and hard work that Jeff & Sally have put into the edmontonian over the past three years. They’ve set the bar high for local blogs!

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