I am happy to announce that I am the most popular and most influential Twitter user in Holywood. That I appear to be the only Twitter user in Holywood makes me slightly sceptical of this result from www.wefollow.com .

I know at least two other Twitter users in this house so I can't be the only one in this town. However in my Twitter settings I am probably the only person to have set "Holywood" as my location.

At time of writing (so if you try this at home you might not get the same result - things can move fast in the Twittersphere) using "Belfast" as a search tag I discover that @nomoreart is the Most Influential User in Belfast. If you already know Marty Neill director of No More Art and c-member of the Digital Circle Steering Group, you will probably not be too surprised at this result.

Neither will you be too surprised by who are the top 5:

2 @alaninbelfast

3 @icedcoffee

4 @stuartgibson

5 @escapeact

There is no explanation of how the site concludes that someone is "influential"; it is not by counting the number of followers. There is a different section for that, where we discover that @EamonnHolmes is the most popular with around 8,000 followers. The next people (as opposed to organisations and businesses) are

2 @icedcoffee

3 @leelowe

4 @stuartgibson

5 @alaninbelfast

What is interesting though is that all of these people know each other (with the probable exclusion of Eamonn who we all know, but I don't know how many he knows). They talk to each other and meet up at events like Open Coffee and BarCamps. I would wager that most of the people on your Friends Lists on Twitter, Facebook and so on are actual, real, non-cyberworld friends. I shake my head and wonder at the narrowness of those who criticise people - particularly young people - for spending so much time on social media. The internet does not replace real life, it affirms and extends it.