MPs on Twitter

Did you ever make a chance remark that plants a seed of an idea which then grabs hold of you and refuses to let you go until you’ve done something about it?

That happened to me on Sunday. I was cleaning up some broken feeds on Planet Westminster when I tweeted:

Cleaning up some broken feeds on Planet Westminster (http://bit.ly/47fCK) Interesting how many MPs’ blogs have vanished since the election.

And a couple of minutes later I added:

Someone should monitor the numbers of MPs actively blogging and tweeting over time. Maybe that should be me.

And that was it. I realised that I’d get no rest until I’d started work on the project.

Yesterday I published a graph of the number of MPs on Twitter over time. It’s only the first step. I want to start tracking how active they are and how well they interact with other Twitter users. Expect more graphs to appear on that page over the coming weeks.

I have to thank the nice people over at TweetMinster. They are doing all the hard work of actually tracking the MPs on Twitter. All I’m doing is processing their list.

A few caveats. Currently the graph is generated manually, so it won’t be kept up to date automatically. Also it just works from the date that people on the list joined Twitter. It doesn’t handle people leaving Twitter – they’ll just come off the list and all of their data will vanish from the graph. So it doesn’t track, things like Nadine Dorries’ two (or is it three) flirtations with Twitter.

You should also note that I also don’t handle people joining Twitter before they become an MP. For example, the first MP to join Twitter was Julian Huppert on 2nd May 2007. But he didn’t become an MP until three years later.

So take it all with a pince of salt, But I think it’s an interesting start. Let me know what you think. And feel free to suggest other useful graphs that I could create.

And, yes, I’ll get round to doing blogs too at some point.

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