.05% On Twitter Generate 50% Of Tweets

Interesting info from Yahoo! Research: "Who Says What To Whom On Twitter."

"By studying the flow of information among five categories (media, celebrities, organizations, bloggers, and ordinary), our analysis sheds light on some old questions of communications research.

First, we find that although audience attention has indeed fragmented among a wider pool of content producers than classical models of mass media, attention remains highly concentrated, where roughly 0.05% of the population accounts for almost half of all attention. Within the population of elite users, moreover, attention is highly homophilous, with celebrities following celebrities, media following media, and bloggers following bloggers.

Second, we find considerable support for the two-step flow of information - almost half the information that originates from the media passes to the masses indirectly via a diffuse intermediate layer of opinion leaders, who although classified as ordinary users, are more connected and more exposed to the media than their followers.

Third, we find that although all categories devote a roughly similar fraction of their attention to different categories of news (World, U.S., Business, etc), there are some differences; organizations, for example, devote a surprisingly small fraction of their attention to business-related news. We also find that different types of content exhibit very different lifespans. In particular... content such as videos and music, which are continually being rediscovered by Twitter users, appear to persist indefinitely."