The periodic table of Kiwi Twitterers

From pavlova with kiwifruit to The Lord of the Rings, Kiwis are known worldwide for diverse reasons.

But we are also becoming prolific on another stage - Kiwis are tweeting like never before.

Twitter's growth began to accelerate like a Christchurch boy racer in early 2009, and since then New Zealanders have slowly but surely jumped on the Twitter train - by the thousands.

For such a small country, NZ has a high number of Twitter users.

According to a recent study, New Zealand is 20th in the international Twitter rankings, making up about 0.47% of active Twitterers.

The next highest on the list, Sweden, makes up fractionally more - about 0.5% of all active Twitter users - and they have a population of over nine million (estimated in 2008), more than twice that of New Zealand, with comparable internet penetration.

Next up the list, with 0.51%, is Chile - they boast a whopping population of over 16 million and a very large proportion of them have internet access.

Here's a graph of the estimated number of Internet users by year in the three countries, if you want to check it yourself.

But basically, we are punching above our weight in the rankings, and it's hardly surprising, really.

Kiwis love to try new things. They love to have a yarn, to hear about the latest gossip and to know what's going on over the back fence (or in Motueka, maybe).

There's a diverse and thriving community of Kiwi "tweeps" always at the ready, including most of our prominent businesses as well as celebrities, geeks, journalists, designers, politicians and everyone else in between.

You quickly get to know the movers and shakers, and the New Zealand Twitterverse doesn't seem to suffer from the same snobbishness as some of the overseas arenas.

Just try getting an answer from any of the big names on anything - I did. I asked Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Lily Allen, Snoop Dogg, Kim Kardashian, Jamie Oliver, Perez Hilton and Shaquille O'Neill what they thought of New Zealand.

Apparently, not much - none of them responded. Must have been something I said.

But in good old NZ, you can be yakking away with the editor of your favourite mag one minute, and talking to the reporter you just saw on the telly the next.

So if you're keen to join the conversation, but are perhaps looking for some interesting people to follow, I present you with the The Periodic Table of New Zealand Twitter Users.

It's by no means a full set - more like a hand-picked selection.

Sure, it might be a little bit biased towards the media/technology side of things, but those types are generally interesting, intelligent, engaging and active, so I reckon it's a good crop. There's something (or someone) there for everyone.

Oh, and all of the chemical symbols are in the right place. It took me some time to figure out good matches for everyone, but I learned a lot about lanthanides and such. My symbol is Lutetium.

Please note that I took a few of the symbols out - the Uu series, mostly. Also, this selection may contain traces of nuts. Click the image for full size.

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