Twitter and Africa

In what may prove to be the most random thing ever, I embarked on a new nerd project today. I incorporated three interests of mine, Africa, Maps and Twitter. I wanted to compare the "twitter footprint" of each country- just how many mentions might each African country get in a week? I used tweetdeck for my "research". I quickly discovered that, using the week long search history, most of the countries had reached the maximum 100 search records. To combat this I instead searched using the hashtag #. I've never understood the reason for using hashtags but it helped this exercise since it greatly reduced the number of search records.

I went ahead and multiplied the results by a million. I did this a.), because it seems to be the way to do these things and 2, because comparing .0000001 and .0000003 isn't all that interesting, or at best, less interesting than when increased to numbers we're more used to seeing.

A few things stood out:

1. People don't often refer to their friends named Chad using hashtags. That, and I'm glad Ocho Cinco hasn't done anything worth mentioning in the last week.
2. I forgot Lesotho! Oops. I checked - zero hashtag mentions, so it's safe to say it would be yellow in the map below.
3. Differentiating between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Republic of the Congo for this exercise is not worth the effort.
4. Not a single person mis-tweeted the word Mail by typing Mali in the last week.
5. More people live in Washtenaw County in Michigan than Western Sahara. While that isn't a surprise, it was surprising to see that the county which boasts both Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan had no #mentions in the last week.

You can click on the map below for a larger image.



I hope you enjoy this little nerd project. I've done a few others you should check out including:

Africa-US Relations
Michigan Man on the Moon
Unredeemed Giftcards

Each country is listed below in its category

Tweet Champs
Seychelles
Western Sahara
Botswana
Mauritius
Liberia
Namibia
Gabon
Madagascar

Very High
Somalia
Gambia
Ghana
Zimbabwe
Cape Verde

High
Congo
Guinea-Bissau
Kenya

Moderate
Rwanda
Swaziland
Malawi
Uganda
Sudan
South Africa
Mauritania

Low
Morocco
Djibouti
Senegal
Burundi
Zambia
Egypt
Tunisia
Congo (Kinshasa)

On Twitter life support
Libya
Mali
Eritrea
Tanzania
Ethiopia
Nigeria
Guinea

Tweet Chumps
Benin
Niger
Algeria
Sierra Leone
Burkina Faso
Cameroon
Togo
Chad
Angola
Mozambique
Côte d'Ivoire
Comoros
Central African Republic
Equatorial Guinea
Sao Tome and Principe

Happy map making, wander-lusting, tweeting and blogging.

For a great perspective on the topic, check out Soyapi Mumba's Blog post