I took the set of users† who posted tweets containing the hashtag #w2s and determined who those users followed. Unlike the list of the most followed users in all of Twitter, the list isn’t dominated by celebrities. (A few coders landed in the top 50.) Regular Radar readers will be familiar with many of the users listed below: over 20 of the top 50 are based in the SF Bay Area. Of the over 700 users I identified, a third follow Tim:
UPDATE: Pete Warden has been doing similar analysis to help conference organizers and attendees. He goes a step further and monitors conversations (one twitter user mentioning another user, and vice-versa). Here is Pete’s network graph of the recent Web 2.0 Summit.
(†) Data for this post was pulled on 10/27/2009. Using the Twitter search API, I was able to identify 1,500 relevant tweets and over 700 unique users responsible for those tweets. Given that I likely omitted earlier tweets, the results are at best an approximation of the true top 50 list.