Personal Democracy Forum: Day 1 by the numbers

The 2009 Personal Democracy Forum has already been a phenomenal success - and we still have another day to go. This truly is the Mecca of online political strategists and thinkers. I think I can speak for the conference as a whole in that it is truly a privilege just to be amongst such brilliant leaders and to learn from them and engage with them here in New York.

If you are on Twitter (Ha! Who am I kidding?) you may have noticed that #pdf09 became what's called a Trending Topic yesterday on Twitter. At one point, #pdf09 (the "official hashtag of the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum") was the #2 Trending Topic on Twitter. That was before we were even done with our first panel! Just goes to show you the power of the aggregate and the influence the PDF '09 attendees each have within their respective social media circles.

As of the time I published this post, 2,232 unique Twitter users have used #pdf09 in their tweets making up a total of 10,657 #pdf09 tweets.

If you have been following my live-tweeting from the Personal Democracy Forum, you know that I make up an admittedly absurd 176 of those tweets. While I was live tweeting one of the early panels yesterday, I realized how useless it was to have a Word document open for me to take notes with because Twitter had become the most powerful, open-source note taker for the entire conference! So while your Twitters-stream may be bombarded with my tweets, I assure you that each one is a carefully thought out tid-bit of information from PDF '09. There are so many fantastic thoughts and ideas being tossed around at this conference that I am making it my responsibility to make sure you hear them.

According to some in the #pdf09 community, I have become a momentary web-celeb for my mass amount of tweets:

As I mentioned on this blog earlier this week, one of the ways you can follow the conversation at PDF '09 is by using this great tool the Bivings Group has put together to track all #pdf09, #pdf2009 or "Personal Democracy Forum" tweets. For most of the day yesterday, I remained at the top of the "Most Tweets" column on this feature which was displayed for the entire conference to see. Someone asked me in a tweet last night to "pls share with us what your follower count increase was after staying on top of #pdf09 twislurp tweeters list today!" So, as promised here are some statistics for my personal Twitter profile growth at PDF '09.

• As mentioned before, I have tweeted 176 times using #pdf09. Roughly 170 of those came during yesterday's live-tweeting from the conference.
• Yesterday, I was retweeted 106 times by some incredibly influential people inside and outside of the Twitterverse.
• Before the conference began, I had 687 Twitter followers. At the time I am publishing this post, I have 794. This was by far my largest day of Twitter growth ever.

I was happy to hear reiterated time and time again at PDF the idea that increasing your Twitter following should not be your primary objective, but rather how many times your content it retweeted. I couldn't agree more with this line of thinking and am thus obviously much more excited about how much my content was retweeted yesterday rather than my follower growth.

We still have another day to go, so make sure you are following all of the great Twitterers from the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum. Here's 5 great ways you can follow the largest most influential conversation of the internet's impact on politics today.