A post on the Guardian Datablog earlier today took a dataset collected by the Tweetminster folk and graphed the sorts of thing that journalists tweet about ( Journalists on Twitter: how do Britain’s news organisations tweet?).

Tweetminster maintains separate lists of tweeting journalists for several different media groups, so it was easy to grab the names on each list, use the Twitter API to pull down the names of people followed by each person on the list, and then graph the friend connections between folk on the lists. The result shows that the hacks are follow each other quite closely:

Nodes are coloured by media group/Tweetminster list, and sized by PageRank, as calculated over the network using the Gephi PageRank statistic.

The force directed layout shows how folk within individual media groups tend to follow each other more intensely than they do people from other groups, but that said, inter-group following is still high. The major players across the media tweeps as a whole seem to be @arusbridger, @r4today, @skynews, @paulwaugh and @BBCLauraK.

I can generate an SVG version of the chart, and post a copy of the raw Gephi GDF data file, if anyone’s interested…

PS if you’re interested in trying out Gephi for yourself, you can download it from gephi.org. One of the easiest ways in is to explore your Facebook network

PPS for details on how the above was put together, here’s a related approach:
Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education
Doodlings Around the Data Driven Journalism Round Table Event Hashtag Community.

For a slightly different view over the UK political Twittersphere, see Sketching the Structure of the UK Political Media Twittersphere. And for the House and Senate in the US: Sketching Connections Between US House and Senate Tweeps