Twitter grabbed the spotlight in June when it became a primary source of news and communications as Iranian citizens took to the streets to protest the disputed election.
It should be no surprise that in Twitter’s analysis of keywords the topic that came up most in 2009 was Iran. Abdur Chowdhury, Twitter’s chief scientist, wrote that #iranelection, Iran and Tehran finished in the top 21 of all trending topics, with #iranelection hashtag finishing first in the category of news, above swine flu.
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“Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, one topic surfaced repeatedly,” the company wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Twitter users found the Iranian elections the most engaging topic of the year. The terms #iranelection, Iran and Tehran were all in the top-21 of Trending Topics, and #iranelection finished in a close second behind the regular weekly favorite #musicmonday.” Hashtags are a user-developed method to make it easier to search within Twitter for particular keywords.
Graph source: blogpulse.com and trendrr.com
Twitter posts on #iranelection reached 100,000 per hour on June 16 and eventually climbed to 220,000 per hour. In response to the Iranian governments shutdown of both local and international from reporting on the events unfolding in Iran, it’s connected populace turned to social media channels, to break the news using mobile phones, through proxy servers setup by freedom of speech advocates in the US and their own blogs and social media outlets.
Following are a couple of graphs from infoharmoni.com analyzing Iran twitter news.
According to retweetradar.com IranElection was top 10 trend for the following 60 days in 2009.
December 7
November 4
September 12, 18
August 1, 2, 3,4,5,8, 10, 17
July, almost the whole month
June, everyday from 13-29
Here is Payvand’s iran_news stats from tweetstats.com (Apr. 09 to Dec. 16 2009)
Below is a partial graph of Payvand’s twitter friends network provided by twitnest.appspot.com
And finally if you like your tweets to be translated to/from Persian please visit http://tweetrans.com/
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