Twitter Topic Stream

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008

The above StreamGraph illustrates the distribution of the most interesting capitolized words in the StatBot dataset of all the updates for the top 100 twitter users. I removed most place names (NY, Paris, Boston etc) and several common words like 'twitter', 'lol', 'company', 'web', and 'internet'. The interestingness of a word was quantified by a function of the total references as well as the burstiness of the word distribution.

The most 'interesting' words in this data are primarily product, technology, or technology event names with the exceptions of 'Scoble' and 'Obama'. This isn't surprising since the top twitter users are early-adopters interested in technology. I was a bit surprised at the large volume for Seesmic but discovered that it is a company founded by Loic Le Meur, the 6th top twitter user.

I also created the twitter topic stream for Robert Scoble shown below. The graphic does a pretty good job of highlighting the primary technologies Scoble focused on over the last year or so.

 


Top Twitter Users StreamGraph
Blog
Wordle