Over the last few weeks I’ve been putting my shoulder into ruby, twitter analytics, basic statistics, and visualization along with the fine young minds of the nascent Web Ecology Project.

One of the first things we looked at was the trending terms on twitter; Specifically, for every day over the last 6 months. I made some fun aggregate visualizations of this with whiskerplots using topfunky’s sparklines gem in ruby: here’s the top 100 trends, and here’s the top 2000. (here’s the code.)

8 twitter trends from 1-jan-2009 to 5-jun-2009

That was all weeks ago, though. Today is a happy day for the WEP because today, we published our first report: Iranian Election and Twitter: The First Eighteen Days. I only contributed a little bit to some of the early twitter stats (I’ll write more about them later) – David Fisher and others were the real hard workers.

From June 7 – 26, we recorded 2,024,166 tweets about the election in Iran, and we found out some pretty interesting things. Guess how many of those 2 million tweets were retweets! Go check out the report to find out (pdf).

Iranian Election and Twitter: The First Eighteen Days