NOTE: Some of you will notice that the report contains only the observed data from STL Tweets and not the results of the user survey. Unfortunately, our recruiting method did not yield a demographically balanced user sample, so the results are anecdotal (at best) and we decided not to include them in the report. We do appreciate everyone who took the time to complete the survey so we will be releasing the results at some point in the near future.

LouFest is an event that we’ve been behind since first announced. Now we’re involved as official sponsors. The festival will feature two days’ worth of local and national artists, including She & Him, Broken Social Scene, Jeff Tweedy and many more.

To celebrate the event, STL Tweets has designed a special LouFest Tweets website that will curate and aggregate any and all #Loufest tweets that go live leading up to and throughout the weekend. For photos, videos and tweets from the event, head over toLouFestTweets.com to stay live and up-to-date with everything that’s happening at LouFest.

Also, as a featured sponsor, STL Tweets will be at the festival giving away free t-shirts plus two official LouFest posters, designed by Sleepy Kitty, one each day. If you’re attending LouFest this weekend, be sure to stop by the STL Tweets booth to learn more and say hello!

We started work with Charter last fall after being assigned a re-design of their current site. Since then, we’ve moved on to other projects together, including writing and producing their newest product videos. Check out the Internet product video:

Motion Work: Charter Business Product Video, Internet from Infuz Agency on Vimeo.

Currently, we’re wrapping up the site re-design – we’ll update the blog with a link and story on that when it goes live. Charter Business has been a client willing to listen and remain open to input and suggestion – we’ve been able to learn as much about their business and way of doing things as they have our culture and ideas we bring to the table. Because of that, the work has been awesome and we’re more than ready for what’s next to develop together.

The algorithm, obviously can’t be fully revealed for many reasons:

1. People would try to game it
2. It’s in flux as we add/remove/tune parameters
3. I talk like a propeller-head and might bore you all to death
4. We might want to monetize it ;)

The essence is this:

We gather all the “organic” tweets via various sources (searches by location, keywords, hashtags, etc.)

We gather all the “curated” tweets via the listed/curated twitteratti we’ve identified for the site.

For each tweet, we extract all the links, hashtags and mentions. For each link, we canonicalize to the final endpoint and score that link. For each mention (and the posting tweep) we extract the basic twitter stats (follower/following/tweets) and ALSO our stats on how many STLTweets-tweets we have (both “curated” and “organic“). For each hashtag, we gather the frequency of use, etc.

From this, we compute the score of interesting links this person posts (based on other tweets to the same canonical link) and give a bonus if they are the originator of the link, We do the same thing for intertesting hashtags (originating/using/etc.)

We also factor in weight of other people mentioning the posting person’s screenname (and do a lot of “distinct within 24 hours”, “not the same user” or “closed-circle”, etc adjustments). Also, we have a manually curated juice value for each tweep, tweet and link that lets us downvote or ban spammers and such.

Each word in the tweet as well as each word in the canonical-link’s description and headline, are all  canonicalized (so that things like spelling issues and such count the same) and scored. Those word scores determine the base-weight of an individual tweet, the tweets referring to a canonical-link help determine the base weight of an individual link, the tweep’s base-weight is based on source (location, mention of hashtag, curated etc.) and ALL of that goes into generating the final weighting the tweets, links, mentions, and hashtags.

All those factors are used to compute how “interesting” in terms of our St. Louis database a particular tweet (and cumulatively) the tweep is to St. Louis.  We also consider the simplistic twitter stats like followers/following/tweets, but those trivial numbers are smoothed by all the other math going on.

After this, we gather the Klout KScore and the Infochimps trstrank values for all the “contenders” and use those to give a “broader scope”.  We would like to do this for everyone, but Klout isn’t too keen on giving us everything. Infochimps have been very gracious and are letting us suck everybody down. We use these “global-scoped” values to ensure that we’re not too biased by the location-specific dataset we have.

Lastly all the various ranking inputs are scaled by “sensistivity” and multiplied by “weight” to compute the overal STLi rank.  We tune those parameters as evidence feeds back into our ranking to help ensure we are tracking actual retweet, click-through and (later) mention of the users.

At last night’s Social Media Club of St. Louis event, Infuz CEO and STL Tweets creator, Jason Fiehler, delivered the top line of the first ever “State of Twitter: St. Louis” report.

This major study focused on tweets within a large urban area, the “State of Twitter: St. Louis” revealed a large collection of data and statistics surrounding Twitter usage in St. Louis – from most popular trends, people and places to usage patterns of the over 200,000 local St. Louisans on Twitter for the first half of 2010.

In addition to KScore from Klout and Trstrank from Infochimps, the extensively curated and locally sourced content collected by STL Tweets was used to develop an algorithm to measure influence within St. Louis based on user tweets, link popularity, and @ mentions, amongst other factors. Both national (Klout, Trstrank) and local (STL Tweets) influence were taken into account to determine a unique, smooth result from the combined data results.

St. Louis’ Most Influential Twitter users:

#1. @RizzoTees
#2. @DLoesch
#3. @MatthewHLeach
#4. @dgoold
#5. @tojosan
#6. @murphylee
#7. @golfnovels
#8. @Nelly_Mo
#9. @RiverfrontTimes
#10. @slackadjuster

Congratulations to the winners on their strong resonance within the highly active St. Louis social media community.

The complete “State of Twitter: STL” report (including an expanded “top 50 most influential tweeps”) will be available for free download in early August.

For more information, please contact Jason Fiehler at (314)-584-8000 or via Twitter @jasonfiehler.

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Klout uses a unique scoring system (KScore) to identify influencers on topics across the social web.

The Infochimps Trstrank measures how important a Twitter user is, measured by centrality, rather than a count of the number of followers a user has.

STL Tweets is the ultimate catalyst for discovering the latest and greatest in St. Louis, as told by the people and trusted local opinion leaders.