Relationships between “top 50″ UK PR twitterers

This is a 300dpi map of the top 50 PR twitterers (as per Stephen Waddington’s analysis) and the interrelationships between them.

To generate this:

We first crawled all the accounts for “friends” (accounts that they follow) and “followers” (accounts that follow them). This is a profligate use of resources because we were always going to throw away a massive load of that data. But it’s always more interesting to start with a large data set. You don’t know what you’re going to find.

Then I wrote a quick-and-dirty perl script to process the data looking only for those instances where one of the top 50 followed another.

Then we dropped everything into NetDraw (if you are at all interested in this stuff, you really should get hold of a copy and start reading around the subject.) We laid out the chart so that the people who have the most peer-group followers are in the centre of the chart – and to make it even more obvious, we sized their nodes according to the number of peer-group followers that they have.

So people on the peripheries (like me – mediaczar) are peripheral to the community, and those in the middle are central. Obvious, huh?

This chart already shows a massive difference between our analysis (as it progresses) and the raw data from Wadds’s list. There are some really good reasons for this, which I’ll go into on the blog.