Tag: twitter

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – November 2009

Welcome to the eleventh 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 is the same as last, primarily Twitter Search but also from Twitter directly. 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.

For November 2009:

# of local users: 5850 (an increase of 219 from October)

To clarify, that means there were 5850 users who posted at least one tweet in November 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.

Here are the rest of the stats for November 2009:

# of tweets by local users: 290542
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 17282 (5.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 106992 (36.8%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 63595 (21.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 17756 (6.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 10054 (3.5%)

I think the retweet number might be a little off, due to the new retweet functionality on Twitter.com, but it’s close. Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

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

Here are the number of local users by community (besides Edmonton itself) for November:

Keep in mind that is based entirely on the text inside the location field of the user’s profile, and is definitely a minimum. Still, gives you an idea of the breakdown.

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Final Thoughts

User growth is still increasing, albeit rather slowly. There were only 9 days with less than 9000 tweets this month, and we broke the 12,000 per day mark for the first time.

Since January, I have identified just over 13,500 local users. The number above, 5850, is how many of them were active in November.

Calgary stats are up next, followed by December stats, then 2009 year-in-review stats. Stay tuned!

Edmonton Twittersphere: #yeg’s 25 Most Listed

In the December issue of Avenue Edmonton magazine there’s an article on Twitter, written by @Persepolian with photography by @bruceclarke. I was interviewed for the piece, and was asked by Avenue to supply a list of local users I’d recommend that newbies follow. There are so many great local users so it was quite a challenge! I think following the #yeg hashtag is probably more useful anyway.

Now that Twitter has had the Lists feature for about a month, I thought it would be interesting to see which users appear on the most lists. Let’s see who the community thinks you should follow! Here are Edmonton’s 25 most listed:

  1. dragonage (399)
  2. redneckmommy (379)
  3. revtrev (314)
  4. NHL_Oilers (293)
  5. wearestereos (200)
  6. gsiemens (199)
  7. lealea (179)
  8. edmontonjournal (164)
  9. cleversimon (159)
  10. patkSTEREOS (155)
  11. mastermaq (149)
  12. paradepro (148)
  13. Pat_Lorna (146)
  14. MilesSTEREOS (136)
  15. britl (124)
  16. CBCEdmonton (120)
  17. ctvedmonton (118)
  18. melanienathan (113)
  19. motherpucker (113)
  20. lyndasteele (112)
  21. CityofEdmonton (109)
  22. dancinginlife (101)
  23. Gen22 (97)
  24. GlobalEdmonton (97)
  25. pixelens (95)

This is based on a dataset of 3732 users, which is the number of users who posted at least 10 tweets from October 1st to November 25th (late last night). Of those, 1999 or 53.6% are members of at least one list, 561 or 15.0% have created at least one list, and 341 or 9.1% subscribe to at least one list. On average, local users are members of 10 lists, have created 3 lists, and subscribe to 3 lists. No one has created more than 20 lists, and just three users subscribe to more than 20 lists.

Two caveats: this only reflects public lists (I have no access to private lists obviously) and it reflects the entire Twitter community (dragonage is on 399 lists, many of which may have been created by non-local users). I hope to have some more detailed stats for the next State of the Edmonton Twittersphere (you can see October’s stats here).

As a total aside, I also looked at the new geo support that Twitter recently launched. You have to go into your Settings to enable it. Turns out just 40 users or 1.1% of the dataset have done that.

Stay tuned for more stats in the next couple weeks!

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – October 2009

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:

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 Edmonton Twittersphere – October 2009

Welcome to the tenth 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 is the same as last, primarily Twitter Search but also from Twitter directly. 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.

For October 2009:

# of local users: 5631 (an increase of 184 from September)

To clarify, that means there were 5631 users who posted at least one tweet in October 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.

Here are the rest of the stats for October 2009:

# of tweets by local users: 270044
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 18021 (6.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 98011 (36.3%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 58448 (21.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 13764 (5.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 7973 (3.0%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

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

Here are the number of local users by community (besides Edmonton itself) for October:

Keep in mind that is based entirely on the text inside the location field of the user’s profile, and is definitely a minimum. Still, gives you an idea of the breakdown.

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Final Thoughts

I was hoping to have stats on Lists in this month’s post, but the API isn’t quite ready yet, so stay tuned for that next month! The increase in users this month was more than double last month’s increase, which is good. The number of tweets being posted by local users continues to rise also – there were three days this month with over 10,000 tweets posted.

Since January, I have identified nearly 12,500 local users. The number above, 5631, is how many of them were active in October.

Calgary stats are up next!

Reporting live in a world with Twitter

As you are undoubtedly aware, a gunman held eight people hostage at the WCB in downtown Edmonton last week. I happened to be on Breakfast Television that morning, so I was on the Citytv set as news was trickling in. I had the opportunity to tweet about the news live on the air:

Unconfirmed via @CitytvEdmonton: armed man holed up in the WCB building downtown. #yeg

It all happened very quickly and if the news wasn’t so terrible, I’d have said it was exciting. Certainly it was a good illustration of one aspect of the social media tools I was scheduled to talk about that morning.

A couple of hours later, I setup a live page on ShareEdmonton to cover the story (the feature is a work-in-progress, so it should be time-boxed but isn’t currently). That enabled anyone to quickly look at the stream of updates coming from Edmontonians related to the hostage situation. I used it throughout the day, and the feedback I received was mostly positive. I think what was most powerful about it was that you simultaneously got updates from the local media (in particular, @lyndasteele) and regular citizens, some discussing the event, others simply trying to find out what was going on. I’m sure many more people were just monitoring the #yeg hashtag in Twitter Search, TweetDeck, or some other app.

I think most found Twitter to be a useful resource that day, but not everyone was happy. Can you guess who complained about the Twitter coverage? Some members of the local media, of course. I heard from a number of journalists throughout the day that they were concerned about posting news on Twitter. Esther Enkin from CBC even wrote about it:

The task is complicated further by the sheer volume of communication. Facebook and Twitter were working overtime. At one point, there was a rumour that someone holed up in the building was updating the situation on Facebook.

The level of speculation and misinformation on Twitter was an object lesson on the need to verify and sift the facts.

Late in the day, someone from CBC tweeted that some hostages had contacted us. We weren’t reporting the fact that we had become involved for a bunch of reasons.

But here is a really important principle. We should not tweet what we wouldn’t put on the air.

I’m not going to deny that verifying the facts is important, but I will disagree that the level of “speculation and misinformation” on Twitter was higher than normal. I think it was the opposite actually – I think Twitter enabled citizens to get the facts faster. Faster than walking around talking to neighbours or coworkers, which is where speculation truly thrives, and certainly faster than waiting for the six o’clock news.

Esther takes care in her article to deny that they were withholding information for competitive reasons:

One reason we didn’t let on is because we didn’t want every other news organization jumping in. Not for competitive reasons, but because the chaos could be dangerous.

Really? Chaos would ensue from other media organizations knowing that CBC had talked to the hostage taker? I’m not so sure.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the media over the last year it’s that they are incredibly competitive. That was the primary concern when Twitter hit the scene in Edmonton back in Februrary – “we can’t tweet that or our competitors will find out.” Maybe Esther is telling the truth, but I don’t believe it.

Her other reason for withholding the information was based on CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices, last amended in 2004 (before Twitter, you’ll note).

Of course, the primary danger of live reporting and detailed descriptions of what is going on outside in a situation like this is that the hostage taker can be listening, watching and logging on.

That makes sense at first, but think about it a little more. That statement implicitly suggests that reporters can collectively control the information the hostage taker is receiving. Really?

Trying to control the information is impossible. You have to assume the hostage taker is going to be looking for information. These days, that probably means he or she is carrying a device with Internet capabilities. You also have to assume that regular people are going to be posting information, people who never went to journalism school and who don’t work for a media organization. Some of those people are going to be merely observers, looking at the situation from the outside. Others will be part of the event.

All the signs point to more information, from more people, faster than ever before. Most of us walk around with phones or other Internet connected devices, and in a couple years you probably won’t be able to buy a device without Internet connectivity. I think that’s the reality, and that’s the world the media need to visualize themselves in.

Stop complaining about the misinformation on social networks, and start preempting it. Stop trying to control the flow of information, and start figuring out how to effectively contribute the facts.

Introducing ShareEdmonton

Today I’m excited to launch ShareEdmonton, a local aggregation platform for Edmonton and area. With it, I want to redefine local media and improve Edmonton by embracing the fact that communication is increasingly taking place online.

You can think of ShareEdmonton as an events calendar, at least right now. It certainly has that functionality, and I want it to become the de facto events calendar for Edmonton. I’ve taken the opposite approach of most online calendaring sites, such as Upcoming or Eventful. Instead of starting at the global level and working down, I’ve started at the local level. This is a simple, but important distinction.

I believe that place is more important than ever. That’s why place is at the heart of ShareEdmonton. Unlike other sites, each place exists once and only once in ShareEdmonton. If you want to find out what’s going on at the Shaw Conference Centre, you can be confident there’s only one in the system. In addition to individual places, ShareEdmonton currently supports neighbourhoods, such as Downtown. This is a powerful way to roll up data about a collection of places.

What kind of data? Events, obviously, but also tweets. For any event, place, or neighbourhood you can see recent related tweets written by people in the Edmonton area, in real-time. Or you can see all tweets written by local users. Over time, I’ll be adding other kinds of data alongside tweets, including blog posts, photos, and more.

ShareEdmonton is all about aggregating the immense amounts of data available online and helping you find the bits that are important, relevant or interesting to you, through place, topic, or some other filter. Here’s an example – George W. Bush is in town tonight, at the Shaw Conference Centre. Here’s the event page on ShareEdmonton (and here’s the page for the rally against him). On it, you find information about the event, the location, and recent related tweets – people talking about the event. Two more examples, using topic as a filter: weather and traffic. That’s pretty powerful, I think, and has the potential to become even more powerful over time.

What’s available today is just a small part of what I hope the site will become. Today is step one, and there’s a long way to go until the vision is realized. I have grand ambitions for ShareEdmonton!

Here are a few other quick points:

  • Though I’m not calling this a beta, it is a work-in-progress.
  • The entire site features clean, hackable URLs.
  • The site also features Microformats. If you’re running Firefox, install Operator and you’ll see your browser “light up” with events, locations, tagspaces, and more.
  • All tweets pages have RSS feeds, and most event listing pages have both RSS and iCal feeds.
  • ShareEdmonton is not, and will not be, open source. I am and will be embracing the concepts of open data, however, so stay tuned for more on that.
  • The engine is generic, so you could in theory turn on ShareCalgary or an aggregator for another city.
  • As I was quoted on Saturday – I’m really not concerned with the business model at the moment. I want to build something that is valuable first.

I want to say a big thank you to everyone who has provided feedback, done testing, and otherwise helped me out with this, especially Chris, Cam, Reg, Eric, Rob, Dickson, Jas, and Adam. Also, though she probably would rather me not say it, Sharon played a big behind-the-scenes role in this – thanks!

Please check out ShareEdmonton, and let me know what you think. Tweet it, blog it, leave a comment below, email me, or post something on the Uservoice forum I’ve setup. You can also follow ShareEdmonton on Twitter, which is where I’ll announce new features. Thanks!

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – September 2009

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.

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 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:

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.

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – September 2009

Welcome to the ninth 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 is the same as last, primarily Twitter Search but also from Twitter directly. 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.

For September 2009:

# of local users: 5447 (an increase of 82 from August)

To clarify, that means there were 5447 users who posted at least one tweet in September 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.

Here are the rest of the stats for September 2009:

# of tweets by local users: 241433
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 14320 (5.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 85819 (35.5%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 49412 (20.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 12343 (5.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 7847 (3.3%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

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

Here are the number of local users by community (besides Edmonton itself) for September:

Keep in mind that is based entirely on the text inside the location field of the user’s profile, and is definitely a minimum. Still, gives you an idea of the breakdown.

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Final Thoughts

Very little user growth again this month. I was expecting it to pick up again in September, but that obviously didn’t happen. The number of tweets being posted by local users is definitely on the rise, however. There were seven days this month with over 9000 tweets posted.

Since January, I have identified just over 11,600 local users. The number above, 5447, is how many of them were active in September.

Should have the Calgary stats up soon!

Recap: EdmontonTweetup6

Just got home from our sixth “official” tweetup here in Edmonton! Thanks to @britl for organizing, as she did for our last tweetup. Tonight we met at Ceilis Irish Pub downtown. They just joined Twitter quite recently but are not exactly new to the Edmonton community as a bunch of local Twitter users have been gathering there regularly for trivia nights. There was a lot going on tonight, such as the Oilers game (yay we won in the shootout!) and a ChangeCamp organizing meeting, but we still had a decent turnout of about 20 people. Thanks to the Social Web Meetup folks for dropping by after their event.

EdmontonTweetup6EdmontonTweetup6

I know I’m missing a couple people, but here is who attended tonight: @britl, @DuncanKinney, @agrabia, @Kiri_W, @LauraSem, @GuitarKat, @VeryAngryBeaver, @wunderbar, @murdawk, @ickleCarlykins, @kevin_bigelow, @TheSpinDoctor, @wburris, @alainsaffel, @dibegin, @chrislabossiere, @fusedlogic, @eadnams, @GenoaK, @mastermaq

Again a great mix of new and familiar faces!

Stay tuned to the wiki and @edmontontweetup for updates on our next event!

Lucy The Elephant on Twitter

As you may know, Lucy the Elephant is the talk of Edmonton right now. Former game show host Bob Barker visited yesterday, trying to secure Lucy’s release from the Valley Zoo. There has been a lot of controversy over whether or not Lucy is healthy and happy in her current home or whether she should be moved to an elephant sanctuary elsewhere. One external veterinarian has examined her thus far, and advised against moving Lucy (critics will point out he was the only one of eleven veterinarians who advised against moving a similar elephant out of Alaska a few years back). For more, check out Paula’s latest article.

I don’t know anything about elephants or zoos, and I haven’t taken the time to do any research, so I don’t really have an opinion on the matter. I do think it’s silly that Barker travelled all the way here just to stir the pot (and that William Shatner has also gotten involved). And sillier still that this will probably go to the courts now, costing everyone a lot of money.

People will continue to talk about it though, until there is some kind of resolution. One of the places they are doing that is on Twitter. Here’s what the chatter about Lucy over the last month and half looks like on Twitter:

To clarify, that is the number of tweets per day about Lucy (or the Valley Zoo, or Bob Barker, or William Shatner) written by local Twitter users. As you can see, it jumped quite a bit yesterday with Barker’s visit and is pretty high already today.

In addition to conversations, Twitter is a good place to find the latest news. I was looking for Lucy-related stuff on Twitter, and figured I could make it easier for others to do the same! Ten dollars and an hour and a half later, and LucyTheElephant.ca was born!

Basically it pulls in the latest tweets related to Lucy (written by local users) and displays them in a manner similar to Twitter Search.

It was a fun experiment for me to create. It uses ShareEdmonton for the data, which means I got to validate some of the work I’ve been doing. If you have a moment, I have a couple questions about this:

  • Do you find single-serving Twitter search sites useful?
  • What else would you want quick access to alongside tweets?

Thanks and enjoy!