Portland’s top 30 tech Twitter-ers (#1 may surprise you)
Before you scroll down. Before you read any further. Just guess.
Who do you think it is? Who is Portland’s top tech Twitter type?
I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought it was probably Marshall Kirkpatrick. Or Josh Bancroft. Or maybe even Scott Kveton.
But I was wrong…
Let’s start from the beginning
You see, I get a great deal of Silicon Florist fodder from Twitter. Interesting tidbits. Snippets of conversations. Clues about what’s happening where. And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.
And while I don’t think there is ever one single good way to rank things, I do have to admit that I find the Portland Start-up Index to be an interesting way of looking at things.
And then there was Aaron Hockley crossing the 5000 tweet mark last night.
And that got me thinking. I began to wonder: Who is at the top of the Twitter heap when it comes to Portland startup and tech types? Who has the most “influence”? Who is the holder of the mythical “Twitter juice”?
I had a fitful sleep of metric-ridden dreams, last night.
So, this morning, I—very unscientifically—started combing through the Portland metropolitan area Twitter types. Trying to figure it out.
After some fits and starts, I had gathered a number of folks from the area. I had their number of followers, the number of people they were following, and the number of updates they had.
Some of the more prolific people weren’t exactly “tech” or “startup” types, so they were the first ones I cut them from the list.
Then, I looked at the number of updates that these folks had. And I cut some of the people with lower numbers of updates.
Then, I looked at the number of followers each of these people had. And the number of people they were following.
To me, it seemed that influence has something to do with the number of people who listened each time a person updated. But, logically, not all of these people were listening from day one, and because of that, a direct multiplication would be inaccurate and misleading.
So, I massaged those numbers a little. And mucked with some of the weighting. Then I took all of that unscientific research and ran it through the Silicon Florist 5000.
And guess what it spit out? I was surprised. And I was wrong with my #1 guess. I’m willing to bet you were, too.
And the #1 isn’t the only surprise.
So here’s what I came up with:
Portland’s top tech Twitter-ers
- (For reference) The Oregonian
- Aaron Hockley
- Scott Hanselman
- Alex Williams
- Scott Kveton
- Tim Lauer (Okay, maybe not exactly a “tech” Twitter type, but given his use I’m throwing him in here.)
- Verso
- Matt Haughey
- Raven Zachary
- Paul Colligan
- Sarah Gilbert
- Audrey Eschright
- Jason Grigsby
- Steven Frank
- Dawn Foster
- Josh Pyles
- Betsy Richter
- Sam Lawrence
- Jason Harris
- Simeon Bateman
- Jake Kuramoto
- Michael Buffington
- Holly Ross
- Jessica Beck
- James Keller
- Rael Dornfest
- Chris Brentano
- Justin Palmer
- Greg
- Peat Bakke*
* Within a hair of the 30th 31st 32nd 33rd spot were Eddie Awad, Justin Kistner, and Chris Griffin.
Now, again, fairly unscientific. But interesting nonetheless. (I had a number of other models for ranking, but this one seemed to do the most justice for the larger group.)
No matter what the case, there is one thing for sure: this is a great group of people to follow if you’re interested in keep track of Portland tech.
Did I miss you? Think I’m off? I’d love to have your input. And I’ll be happy to adjust the list, as needed.
Things people have said about this post
From Jeff the Great on March 19th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I love this type of stuff. Totally interesting, and totally pointless! the type of thing my wife makes fun of me for!
I’d love to see the formula or at least the thresholds you used to include/exclude someone. One thing to consider is the time someone has been on Twitter. Both for the aspect of seniority and the number of tweets. A new user like myself only has 500 updates, but thats within the last 2 months.
Seriously, I love this type of stuff! Keep it up!
From Josh Bancroft on March 19th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Wow, #3? How did that happen? Oh, yeah. The bribe. Check’s in the mail, Rick!
Seriously, though, this is fascinating. Thanks for putting it up, and helping me find more cool Portland people to connect with!
From http://ahockley.myopenid.com/ on March 19th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
I have no idea what the “Silicon Florist 5000″ looks like, but for some reason I picture you driving something looking vaguely like a zamboni.
Now that you’ve ranked me #5, I have a mission to overtake #4. Watch out. You’re a marked man…
From Dawn Foster on March 19th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Apparently, I need to work on my Twitter juice. Number 17 is perfectly respectable, but I know I can do better
This is really interesting, and thanks for pulling it all together!
From grigs on March 19th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Who is this Rick Turoczy guy?
From Marshall Kirkpatrick on March 19th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
I think we need a Silicon Florist interview with Mr. Kobayashi!
From Jason Grigsby on March 19th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Oh wait a minute! Do I hear saber rattling coming from Dawn? I’m only 2 away from her and she apparently plans on taking my spot.
From Rick Turoczy on March 19th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Wow. I feel as if I may have struck a chord. Maybe.
@Jeff I really like the idea of “time” as one of the metrics. I didn’t see an easy way to pull the “joined on” date, but I can go back to the first tweet to establish that date.
@Aaron Do you have a camera over here? That’s exactly what the Silicon Florist 5000 looks like.
@Dawn We’ll have to see if you can untangle the mystic algorithm. I wish you luck.
@Grigs You should have seen all the ways I devised to put myself at #1, like “If name == ‘turoczy’ then rank == 1.” But I threw those out so as not make it completely obvious.
@Marshall I think that’s a great idea. And it looks like he’s bilingual (at the very least), so maybe we could have a Japanese version of that interview, as well.
From Josh Pyles on March 19th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Very interesting article!
I’m surprised I made it on the list, but that’s totally awesome!
From Chris O'Rourke on March 19th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
That’s awesome and a great introduction to few of those folks I don’t currently follow. I do see the oregonian as sort of the oddman out since they’re not literally part of the tech community but meh it’s all good.
Nice to see @verso on there, the top ten is full of people I’d like to emulate and hopefully no one on the list minds being somewhat of a mentor as I transition from a wee acolyte I am in the community to the happy go lucky portvangelisticexpialidocious (oops that word got away from me)as I was saying happy go lucky free (as in beer (and/or bacon)) source community wonk I wish to be.
Also upon reading what I just wrote I do believe that this comment should be taken out and shot.
From Rick Turoczy on March 19th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Update note: Sam Lawrence was inadvertently omitted. (I blame my search tools and myself.) So he’s been run through the Silicon Florist 5000 and has landed at #20.
So now, it’s the top 31.
In other news, word around the campfire is that Dawn Foster is working on a pipe to save me from my own ineptitude in the future. No, really. She is. Despite what she may tell you.
From PDX Companies on March 19th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Do Tweets in Japaneses count?
From Rick Turoczy on March 19th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Scott Hanselman didn’t have his location listed in his profile, so he didn’t show up on my searches. Nice try @shanselman! I still found you.
Scott is now #6 on the Top 32 list.
From sharon on March 19th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Only 20,559 tweet for #1?
Heh. Wow.
From Rick Turoczy on March 19th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Yeah. And in less than a year at that. Oy.
From Adam Boettiger on March 20th, 2008 at 5:59 am
Rick, I’m surprised nobody has said this, so I will don my flame-proof underwear and say:
1. I love that you’re doing this. It’s important to know who to connect with locally.
2. I would argue whether sheer _volume_ of updates is any indicator of whether a person is of influence or not. I could tweet every 10 minutes about the weather and any number of irrelevant things. Would my volume of updates make me more influential? Probably not.
Less is more in today’s information economy.
Relevance is what counts, although this is admittedly impossible to measure on twitter.
The number of followers (listeners as you put it) is somewhat relevant, but that too can simply be an indicator of something other than influence. For example, there’s a guy I’ve seen who is literally “buying” friends by giving away a free MacBook Air when he reaches X level of followers. Is he influential? Some would say yes. Others would say he’s just full of himself.
I’d be much happier doing 3-6 updates per day - relevant ones, than I would one every 10 minutes. And doing so doesn’t make me any less influential. In fact it probably makes me more influential because folks would actually _read_ them. In the same breath, I’d be much happier with 100 to 500 of the _right_ followers/relationships than I would with 10,000 to 15,000 unknowns.
That’s my two cents on this Thursday morning as I type from the train on EVDO downtown Portland.
Adam Boettiger
http://twitter.com/AdamBoettiger
From Jeff the Great on March 20th, 2008 at 10:13 am
you considering @ replies? that’s probably huge…interesting people like @shanselman and @Ahockley get lots of replies. Uninteresting people don’t.
From Rick Turoczy on March 20th, 2008 at 10:20 am
@Jeff That’s starting to get into what http://tweeterboard.com is trying to do. Again, a great idea. Thank you.
Update note: The list is now the top #33. The Silicon Florist 5000 said Jason Harris should be in the list. Thanks to Jake Kuramoto for pointing out the oversight.
From Tom Turnbull on March 20th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Hey, I may not tweet a lot, but at least my tweets are low quality. Uh…
http://twitter.com/tomturnbull
From Conversations A-twitter | Techvibes Blog on March 24th, 2008 at 11:59 am
[…] over at Silicon Florist did a recent post making a rough list of Portland’s top tech Twitter-ers (by the measure of followers * updates). By the same metrics, Vancouver’s top twitter users […]
From http://tlucich.myopenid.com/ on April 20th, 2008 at 6:57 am
Clearly I’m not tweeting enough. I’ll do my best to make a run for Top 1000.
From Anna on May 7th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Hajime Kobayashi sits in the desk right next to me everyday at the Lunarr office & I had no idea he was the #1 Portland Twitterer. It’s like sitting next to a celebrity!