Here’s another reason why I think Conversation should not be weighted so high: busy online professionals don’t need another channel for conversation — email, IM, voice, and SMS are more than enough. (And then there’s “DMing” on Twitter itself!) I just don’t think conversation is a major feature driving analysts to use Twitter. Among the overall population of people using Twitter today (which recently surpassed one million), I think it’s exceedingly obvious that far, far more of them use the service to read, follow, or lurk, if you will, than engage in conversation — at least within the confines of a 140-character Twit. There are far better ways to converse.

cheers,
Graeme
http://www.tech-surf-blog.com

Some find value in putting questions out to the community in the hope of finding an answer, some post links that others find useful, some promote their own blog posts, some are interested in the conversation so will use @ signs more than others, some follow a lrge number more people than follow them so they can listen to the conversation, some have a large following but don’t follow nearly the same number back, and some like Twitter merely to see what they’re friends are doing.

Add to this the fact that each individual will place differing amounts of value on each of these uses and you instantly find that any list becomes overwhelmingly subjective, even if boiled down just to ‘rank’ analysts.

Do analysts largely provide links to interesting and relevant articles? Do they provide comment on conversations or current topics of note? Or do they merely respond to people’s questions and offer their own insight?

On the other side of the coin, do the audience that look to analysts find value from these analysts in this ‘new’ medium?

Depsite all this, the list is a great idea and I’m looking forward to seeing the results - don’t let my concerns put you off!

In terms of a future survey, perhaps you could throw it open to vote (eg nomination re who you most interact with and value gained from this) starting say with UK people initially? Also options around using twitter analytical tools that are out there to identify the people that are not only followed/following but things like ‘@s’ to them/from them etc. People like IBM may also be able to help with their in house software which they’ve used to map strength over relationships between people then mapped into ‘influencer clouds’ (not a phrase they use but a possibility)?

You are right in that the one of the joys of ‘new’ media is that it is changing many peoples roles into that of an analyst. However, for the purpose of this study I have elected to only focus on those people whose company is recognised as an analyst firm.

However, perhaps I could also do a second study with the same methodology with a selected list of individuals. The main question though - is what people do you select? Should this be a pre-selected list or one that is created?

I guess how you structure your survey depends on whether you are looking to really only focus on the establishment or recognise emergent individuals and communities who discuss, debate and influence one another over twitter in a way that isn’t as possible through blogging. If you are truly looking to focus on micro-blogging and bloggers who analyse, informa, educate and influence, I think focusing on the usual suspects will be hugely limiting - and produce hugely expected results I’d imagine.

Does Twitter not spell the start of a new world whereby everyone’s an analyst (or at least all those working in and commenting on this world)? I may not be an analyst formally in the traditional sense, but would like to think that my comments and conversations via Twitter in relation to government and IT are insightful and useful (well mostly!) and make people think and act differently in some small way (the traditional role of the analyst?).