Speaking from a biased position, there were many highlights last Thursday night at the LSS@Social Media Week event.  But the definite dot on the i that ensured it was a memorable night was when Dr. Bernie Hogan, presented the graphic below.

After Bernie completed his talk, Rebuilding the Collapsed Contexts in Social Media, Bernie performed an analysis of the Twitter API using NodeXL to build a network diagram of all the people who had tweeted with the hashtag #smwLDN.

Click on image for full size

To help us understand it, Bernie included the following notes when he sent over the image for us to publish on the Local Social Summit blog.

This is a twitter network of all people who tweeted #smwLDN

People who ended up retweeted or mentioned by at least 4 others have a thumbnail and label. Color means number of followers – red means lots of followers, blue means few followers.

In the center is one big group, linked through several tenuous connections such as Jeremy Jacobs and mediaczar.

In the upper right is another group with stevebridger and 1000heads.

In the bottom are all the small groups of singletons or dyads who tweeted the tag.

The arrows point outwards showing where tweets went as people mentioned or retweeted #smwLDN. Clearly, its paid off for the organizers to be be active in using their own hash tag as smwLDN has the high number of mentions outwards.

All of the nodes that seem to fan out from a single person highlight someone who has a relatively active audience. Some of these people share an audience, too.  SteveBridger and lesanto have a lot of fans incommon (since these fans retweeted or mentioned both of these people).  The same can be said for EEPaul and BernieJMitchell.

But of course, this graph also shows that Twitter is a rather thin medium. Social Media Week London had 16,000 followers, and yet the application only picked up 30 retweets or mentions from them (mazi has most herein with 34,800).

Bernie is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and we feel lucky to have had him speak so far at two Local Social Summit events.   Amongst other more academic venues, Bernie’s work on Facebook will be featured in the forthcoming “Analyzing Social Media with NodeXL” edited by Derek Hansen, Marc Smith and Ben Shneiderman due in mid-July.

You can find more about Bernie on his Oxford Internet Institute microsite or follow him on Twitter.