In the past I’ve done a favorites list at the end of each year, but I’ve been enjoying using Python to download tweets, so I decided to try something new. I downloaded the last year’s worth of tweets from people who in my opinion consistently link to good sources and combined them all to see what links were most popular. I used a number of people from the list that I maintain here. Obviously my focus was nutrition, but the people I chose represent a broad survey of food, nutrition, biotech, and other health topics. Here is a CSV of the 34 people I included.

After removing 6 people who tweeted more than 3,200 times in the last year and therefore I couldn’t collect a full year’s worth of tweets, here is a plot of tweet counts per week of the 28 others. It seems there is a slight summer spike:

There were 20,383 links among 41,479 tweets. I wrote code to expand the links that were shortened, and incorporated the number of times the link was retweeted.

So here are the most popular links of 2012 from these 34 people. I added notes to the top 10:

So, it over-represents some stories but for a really simple method it isn’t bad for showing a sampling of popular links.

Happy new year!