The Infinite Dial

At the very least, the Twitter top 99 chart now appearing on We Are Hunted is diverse. It's a chart where not only do Blink-182's "What's My Age Again" and Black Eyed Peas' "Hey Mama" show up, many years after their last airplay, but so do Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" and Smiths' "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out," despite never having really been radio records.

What else? Eminem's "We Made You" at No. 1; lots of teen pop (both Miley and Hannah, Jonas Brothers, Taylor Swift), some classic Alternative and a lot of Classic Rock.

We Are Hunted's Nick Crocker tells Read Write Web that the chart is calculated by "sampling Twitter throughout the day looking for tweets that indicate someone is listening to or playing music and analyzing these tweets in our semantic engine." RWW takes that to includes tweets of Blip.fm and Last.fm activity.

There are a few obvious limitations here. One is what people are going to announce they listen to in public. If I had to Tweet something from my iPod right now, it would be "Head On" by Jesus & Mary Chain, but it took six songs before I found one I was willing to admit to in a public place. You also have to wonder if "What's My Age Again" is a potential bringback for radio or merely a title that makes for funny Tweets. And how many mentions did it take to put Simon & Garfunkel's "Cecelia" on the chart at No. 83? That could shake your confidence in the data daily.

There is also no age (or other demo) data of course. So the only evidence, anecdotal, you have that this represents the younger audience that radio's research often excludes, is in the eclecticism that you often hear attributed to younger listeners. But it's fascinating to see "Stairway to Heaven" and "Poker Face" living on the same chart somewhere.