A new “map” of Twitter from researchers Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute and Monica Stephens of Humboldt State gives us a pretty good visual of what’s out there. Their graphic shows by size the number of geocoded tweets coming from different countries during a week-long period in March of this year. Their sample covers 20 percent of all geocoded tweets during that time — amounting to a sample of 4.5 million. (The authors warn that there may be biases in the data, if some countries have a greater propensity to geocode than others. Only one percent of tweets are geocoded overall.) In addition, they’ve shaded each country’s rectangle to represent its level of “Twitter penetration” — darker boxes are for countries where a larger percentage of Internet users are on Twitter; lighter boxes show countries with few tweeters relative to the size of the Internet-using population.
Click the pic to take a closer look.