Twitter's Top 40 Political Influencers in January

I've been looking closely at how ideas and talking points spread on Twitter. My algorithms are all tied together with duct tape and require significant hand-holding, but some results are finally beginning to come together.

As Take America Forward readers are no doubt aware, I've been watching the hashtags #teaparty, #tcot and #p2 particularly closely. On those hashtags, an elaborate economy of tweets, retweets and mentions exposes a hierarchy of influence. Based upon some early influence metrics, the political Twittersphere would have the following "Top 40 Influencers" in January.

The algorithms currently assume tweet and mention counts are important, and also the number of unique mentioners. The actual breakdowns for these users would be:

I could use some feedback if you have any ideas about how to improve this analysis. In the meantime, enjoy this primitive network model for January (colors and sizes have equivalent meaning: greater influence).