Thursday 27 December 2012

Top 100 Tweeting Bloggers 2012

The top 100 list of tweeting political bloggers is finally here!

Before we move to the main dish, a few remarks on the criteria for inclusion. As this post on defining political bloggers makes clear, a blog is a website produced by an individual or collective organised primarily around user-generated content, and has a comments facility.

There are a couple of other caveats. To be included below, the blog or blogger has to be posting regularly (within the last 45 days) and has to be contributing to something that identifies itself as a blog, regardless of whether it's a traditional blogging platform, something bespoke, or a site hosted by an established media organisation. Lastly, the writer has to define themselves as a blogger. For example, while prominent columnists like Suzanne Moore and Richard Littlejohn appear on mainstream media sites that exhibit the architecture one would associate with blogging, they do not - as far as I'm aware - regard themselves as bloggers nor engage with the comments left below their articles.

So, without further ado:

1. Jon Snow (251,543 followers)
2. Robert Peston (214,384 followers)
3. Alastair Campbell (198,921 followers)
4. Nick Robinson (127,802 followers)
5. Tom Watson MP (108,869 followers)
6. Guido Fawkes (89,639 followers)
7. Krishnan Guru-Murthy (87,598 followers)
8. Owen Jones (74,442 followers)
9. Comment is Free (66,840 followers)
10. Paul Mason (59,226 followers)
11. Laurie Penny (55,499 followers)
12. Stephanie Flanders (54,817 followers)
13. Caroline Lucas (49,475 followers)
14. Faisal Islam (49,362 followers)
15. Michael Crick (47,202 followers)
16. New Statesman (46,740 followers)
17. Mehdi Hasan (43,991 followers)
18. Fraser Nelson (40,814 followers)
19. Huffington Post UK (39,942 followers)
20. David Allen Green (39,311 followers)
21. Adam Boulton (37,920 followers)
22. Cathy Newman (36,308 followers)
23. Iain Dale (35,831 followers)
24. Toby Young (32,773 followers)
25. Tim Montgomerie (32,302 followers)
26. Left Foot Forward (28,631 followers)
27. Sunny Hundal (28,210 followers)
28. Daniel Hannan (26,493 followers)
29. Michael White (26,228 followers)
30. FT Westminster Blog (25,581 followers)
31. Andrew Sparrow (24,425 followers)
32. Gideon Rachman (24,241 followers)
33. Benedict Brogan (23,963 followers)
34. Helen Lewis (23,553 followers)
35. Political Scrapbook (23,130 followers)
36. Sophy Ridge (22,594 followers)
37. Labour List (22,272 followers)
38. John Rentoul (22,065 followers)
39. Harry Cole (21,143 followers)
40. Eoin Clarke (20,605 followers)
41. Demos (18,156 followers)
42. False Economy (16,749 followers)
43. Glen Oglaza (16,512 followers)
44. Conservative Home (16,327 followers)
45. The Spectator Coffee House (15,518 followers)
46. Open Democracy (15,325 followers)
47. Iain Martin (15,314 followers)
48. 38 Degrees (15,313 followers)
49. Liberal Conspiracy (15,227 followers)
50. Richard Murphy (15,205 followers)
51. Gary Gibbon (14,996 followers)
52. Old Holborn (14,415 followers)
53. Adam Smith Institute (13,456 followers)
54. Allegra Stratton (13,346 followers)
55. Rowenna Davis (13,131 followers)
56. James Delingpole (12,879 followers)
57. Charlie Beckett (12,385 followers)
58. The F-Word (12,103 followers)
59. UK Progressive (11,808 followers)
60. Lynne Featherstone MP (11,712 followers)
61. Jonnie Marbles (11,603 followers)
62. Douglas Carswell MP (11,593 followers)
63. Nick Cohen (11,431 followers)
64. James Kirkup (11,394 followers)
65. Danny Blanchflower (11,348 followers)
66. Labour Uncut (11,198 followers)
67. Ellie Mae O'Hagan (11,234 followers)
68. Jody MacIntyre (11,094 followers)
69. Dan Hodges (10,856 followers)
70. The Commentator (9,728 followers)
71. New Left Project (9,626 followers)
72. Joey Jones (9,589 followers)
73. Progress (9,312 followers)
74. Angela Neptustar (9,083 followers)
75. Archbishop Cranmer (8,862 followers)
76. LibDem Voice (8,857 followers)
77. Cath Elliott (8,775 followers)
78. Dawn Foster (8,491 followers)
79. Jonathan Isaby (8,284 followers)
80. Mark Ferguson (8,037 followers)
81. Jacqui Smith (7,993 followers)
82. Compass (7,766 followers)
83. Martin Bright (7,563 followers)
84. Diary of a Benefit Scrounger (7,437 followers)
85. Boris Watch (7,317 followers)
86. Benefit Scrounging Scum (7,269 followers)
87. Mike Smithson (7,157 followers)
88. Labour Matters (6,913 followers)
89. Jon Worth (6,738 followers)
90. Bloggerheads (6,703 followers)
91. Lenin's Tomb (6,665 followers)
92. Another Angry Woman (6,635 followers)
93. Mark Pack (6,526 followers)
94. James Cleverly AM (6,477 followers)
95. Adam Bienkov (6,395 followers)
96. Labour Left (6,281 followers)
97. Alex Massie (6,211 followers)
98. Jon Craig (6,210 followers)
99. Hopi Sen (6,182 followers)
100. Jim Pickard (5,895 followers)

There are lots of things that are striking about this list. But two that really jumped out while I was compiling it was the woeful under representation of women. The second is how the list, and especially its upper reaches, are utterly dominated by professional journalists and bloggers that have broken onto mainstream media platforms. This is the continuation of a trend I first discussed in the 2010 list. If we're honest, the list reads more like a who's who of political journalists and opinion formers than anything else. So maybe next year I'll throw together a list of independent bloggers, which excludes the journos and bloggers who write more or less exclusively for media sites. Who knows? Maybe that will be just enough to see my humble Twitter feed sneak back into the top 100.

Of course, as is the nature of these things the endeavour to be complete often means someone was inadvertently left out. If you think a tweeting blogger has been overlooked, let me know in the comments below.

So, any surprises? Did you make the list?

Update 29.12.12
It turns out the first draft was very comprehensive indeed and only failed to capture three active tweeting bloggers that have enough followers for the list. It's now updated, meaning Aaron Peters, Obo the Clown and Crash, Bang, Wallace are booted off by Cyber Boris (Angela Neptustar), Danny Blanchflower and the recently-returned Iain Dale.

If there are any more that have been missed please let me know below.

18 comments:

Rowan Draper said...

You should definitely take the pros out. It would be great to see a grass roots kind of approach

Phil said...

I will. Who know, if I have time over the next few weeks I might just do that.

Sue Marsh said...

It's not striking at all!! Doing it on twitter followers mean famous journos etc will always top the list, whether anyone reads their blog or not.

Ralf Grahn said...

It would be nice to define language, geographical or other scope etc. before presenting a list such as this.

TheGeneral said...

Nigel Farage left out for fun i guess? He'd be 11th...

Phil said...

I would have thought it's pretty obvious seeing as this is a UK-based blog that spends most of its time talking about UK-based political and cultural issues, AND that all of the people on this list also talk about UK politics and other related UK issues.

But there is another observation to be made - where are the Irish, Welsh and Scottish bloggers? Bella Caledonia, with just shy of 5,100 followers when I compiled this missed out on a place by a whisker. Are there others I've missed?

Phil said...

I didn't know Farage ran a regular blog. I'll check him out and put him on the tea time update if that turns out to be the case.

Anonymous said...

A certain Nick is missing... oh well that's "democracy" for you...

angela said...

Iain, shouldn't I be on your list? I blog for Boris, tweet every day with 9,089 followers and write a blog solely on politics nearly every day?

Phil said...

You should indeed, Angela. I'll add you when I update it in the next couple of hours.

Anon, which Nick are you talking about?

Anonymous said...

What about D Blanchflower 11.3k

Phil said...

Good point. He'll be added when I update, which probably won't be tonight after all!

angela said...

Phil dear, last year I was omitted from your list, even though my tweets and number of blogs meant I should be on there. When I told you, you said you would put me on next year.

This year it is the same story, i am still not on the list. You regret that there are so few women on the list but I hope you did not mean only Labour women. I do not think you would be so unfair as to exclude me for two years running because I am a Tory, so hope you are fair enough to amend the list as you promised yesterday, thanks so much Phil.

angela said...

Phil, do you remember, I qualified to be on the list last year and you said you would definitely put me on this year.

I know you want more women on there, but would be awful if you only let Labour women be on there.

Phil said...

1) I didn't do it last year.

2) You will be added when I do the revision, which is when I'm ready - not anyone else.

3) The only people who are politically excluded are the far right, of which you're not one.

incurable hippie said...

Thanks for adding us at The F-Word, I've just added a post about it to the blog. It's great to see a collection of grassroots Tweeters all together in one place!

Jack of Kent said...

Many thanks for including me, but I am really far more of a legal blogger than a politics one; and if you don't include (say) law bloggers on contemporary issues like Carl Gardner or Adam Wagner then perhaps no point including me.

Phil said...

Good points - you've been included because you contribute to the collective political blog the New Statesman has become. But if memory serves, you were on the two previous lists as well.