I had the pleasure of attending Gnomedex 9.0 this weekend. Our friend Chris Pirillo put on a fabulous event! Not surprisingly, at a conference for geeks, there was a non-stop tweet stream during the event. I was curious to breakdown the activity on Twitter from the #gnomedex crowd. We pulled tweets from just after the conference began to the end of the final party (NOTE: this data excludes RTs).
Geeks are a pretty active crowd on Twitter. 1190 people sent 6619 tweets about #gnomedex in just over 48 hours.
The top 20 handles accounted for ~23% of the total #gnomedex tweets. Here’s who led the charge:
Although there was a high concentration at the top, the activity was more evenly distributed than the broader Twitterverse. In general, the top 5% of users contribute 75% of tweets and 10% contribute 86% (according to Sysomos). The #gnomedex sample was less concentrated – the top 5% of users accounted for 42% of all tweets and 10% of users accounted for 58% of all tweets.
General Distribution of Activity in Twitter
The #gnomedex stream generated a lot of quality content sharing and a relatively low rate of spam. About 25% of all #gnomedex tweets included links to external content. Of these posts, we estimate ~4% pointed to spammy links (again excluding RTs). On the two occasions #gnomedex went trending, spammers tried to sell geeks on “free groceries” (~70% of spam) and a site where you can supposedly watch Inglourious Basterds & District 9 for free. I’m guessing the CTR on those offers was pretty close to zero.
And finally, our demographic analysis of the event showed that geeks dominated the #gnomedex tweet stream 
