Twitter Followers of World Leaders Mapped

A few days ago, Geographic Travels made a post about world leaders on twitter. I have a real love-hate relationship with twitter. Twitter offers a world of possibilities but those are only realized by a small few, myself excluded. I end up bouncing between a world of spam and one of inactivity.

So while the post on world leaders using twitter is great by itself, my geo-eye saw data - raw data that craved to be mapped! I searched how many followers each account had to see if the data held anything of particular interest. I've tried before to measure twitter popularity in an interesting yet 100% non-scientific way in a previous nerd project!

For the map below, I created a new point GIS layer and added info about how many followers each account listed. Now, don't take the scaled symbols too literally. I had to do some scaling when you have Obama at more than 5 million followers and others with barely 1,000. We can't learn much from this map- but it's still cool! I've included the data at the bottom of this post.

The unexpected outlier in this data set is Jordan and Queen Rania Al Abdullah. Although, it doesn't take much to figure out why ;) To find out for yourself, simply do a google search and follower her on twitter @QueenRania.


I mention Geographic Travels in part because they are one of the best geography blogs out there. Good blogs are hard to find and finding a good GEOGRAPHY blog is an even greater challenge.

Along with Geographic Travels, I was fortunate to be listed on the recently named 50 Best Geography Blogs for Geography Geeks. The fact that Samantha Rhodes was able to assemble this list of blogs is an accomplishment by itself. What impresses me most is that the listing actually provides a reasonable description of each blog. When I found out I was on the list I was sure that the description of my blog would be straight from my meta tags. It certainly wasn't.

Samantha provided this snippet to describe World Geo Blog "Read World Geography Blog for global news and views about the immensely intimate relationship between people and places." Its a better description than I could ever come up with and I'm thankful for the recommendation.

Go check out the 50 Best Geography Blogs and let me know what else you find!

Also check out another great geography blog I found - The Basement Geographer.

As promised...The Data!

Canada - 64,600
Chile - 195,000
Costa Rica - 1,100
Denmark - 6,100
Ecuador - 5,700
France - 5,200
Israel - 8,500
Jordan - 1,350,000
Latvia - 3,900
Malaysia - 32,500
Mexico - 110,200
New Zealand - 12,600
Norway - 33,200
Russia - 42,900
South Korea - 23,900
Thailand - 126,000
Turkey - 86,800
UAE - 349,000
UK - 1,750,000
USA - 5,300,000

The Geography Blog

Apparently my love of maps is not shared by many. Niche shops and niche bloggers are out there but with few exceptions one cannot mention their affinity for maps without a look of confusion trickling across the face of the listener.

Maps represent tangible places and experiences. When I was a kid I would look for simple geographic features, like the curving of a coastline or the bending of a road and try to find that feature on a map. I thought about the technology and thought that must go into map making and how refined maps had become compared to their mid-millennium counterparts. I was also a strange kid :)

Now I spend a good portion of my life making maps. For the most part they are simple with a narrow and somewhat boring purpose but I'm hoping to change that. Geography, maps and imagery is my true passion. It's a way to make sense and capture moments in an ever changing and beautiful landscape.

Geography lets us keep our physical place on this planet and in the universe in perspective. It allows us to relate to each other in a multitude of geospatial and cultural ways. It makes us human.

On this blog, I'll run the gamut from google earth to maps, general geography and did you knows, how to's and new technology. I hope you enjoy it as much as I like experiencing it!

Let's get started!