The RB reader out there who hates when I cover Twitter tools — you know you are! — stop reading now, because this writeup is all Twitter. In fact, it’s about one more attempt to rank Twitter users by how much influence they have on their followers.

After all, it doesn’t matter if you have eighty-gazillion followers if no one actually reads what you have to tweet, right?

Futurity recently reported on a site from Northwestern University called Pulse of the Tweeters (http://pulseofthetweeters.com/.) It describes itself this way: “Pulse of the Tweeters uses Data Mining, Sentiment Analysis, and Network Analysis algorithms to mine millions of tweets and find the most influential users on Twitter.”

It doesn’t look like you can search for influencial Twitterers using anything but trending topics. Which means I had no luck searching for trends that are popular right now locally. I tried and failed (no results) with several searches until I got results for NFL . (There’s also a list of trending topics on the front page, so you can browse without searching.)

PotT ranks tweeters by influence (the top influencer for NFL, unsurprisingly, is @OGOchoCinco), but also offers rankings by number of followers (also @OGOchoCinco) and number of tweets (that top rank is held by @steelersreport). PotT also attempts to denote the tenor of the tweets, showing a pie chart of positive, negative, and neutral tweets.

For each Twitterer, you can get a list of recent tweets along with others which follow that account and recent tweets of theirs which also include your searched-for keyword.

I learned about some folks I wouldn’t have otherwise known about this way, but for the most part this site didn’t do me much good. I’m interested in knowing who’s influential for words like database and that, sadly, just doesn’t trend.