Last year and earlier this year, GeekDad spent some time making sure you were all aware of the best geeks to keep track of in 140 character form.

So, we are pleased to see that many Geek Tweeps and some good friends of GeekDad have made the final nominations for this years Shorty Awards. Over 250,000 nominations have been tweeted for The Shorty Awards to determine the six finalists in each of the 26 official categories. The winners will be announced on March 3, 2010 at the TheTimesCenter in The New York Times Building and we will be hoping a few of our geeky heroes will be among them!

Here is a run down of the Geek representation in the final nominations by category:

• Brand: Sesame Street @sesamestreet & Marvel Entertainment @Marvel
• Celebrity: Nathan Fillion @NathanFillion & Stephen Fry @stephenfry
• Customer Service: thinkgeek @thinkgeek
• Entertainment: MythBusters Official @MythBusters
• Government: NASA @NASA
• Humor: Mrs Stephen Fry @MrsStephenFry
• Literature: Neil Gaiman @neilhimself & Warren Ellis @warrenellis
• Science: Adam Savage @donttrythis

We wish these folks the best come awards night - and if you aren’t following these folks yet, get to it people.

Here, then, is a revised list. Known-fake accounts have been removed from the list, and, where possible the correct account has been listed. In addition, unintentional oversights have been corrected. The list below before the break is of accounts that are either new or fixed from the original list; the remainder of the original list is included after the break (though some folks have been reordered for the sake of readability.

The Twitter list @cerebus19/geekymedia has been updated accordingly. Thank you to everyone who commented with corrections/suggestions. Please keep making them!

From now until February 8, followers of the official MythBusters Twitter feed will have a chance to enter their Superfan Sweepstakes to win a trip to Comic-Con 2010 to meet the MythBusters in person. The official rules for entry can be found at the official MythBusters website — all you have to do is follow @MythBusters and tweet a specific phrase, and you can enter once per day for the duration of the sweepstakes.

But wait! That’s not all. As part of the promotion of this sweepstakes, you can enter to win a MythBusters T-shirt from us at GeekDad. In addition to the sweepstakes rules, you’ll need to also follow GeekDad’s official Twitter feed at @WiredGeekDad, then tweet “I’m following @MythBusters and @WiredGeekDad, and you should, too! http://bit.ly/59PJmU” (the link points to this article).

We’re not yet certain exactly how many T-shirts the folks at Discovery will be sending us, but we’ll be choosing randomly from everyone who is following both accounts when the sweepstakes ends and has tweeted the above message before that time.

Check out the promo video for the sweepstakes below.

The project—TweetFreq—originated last May after Starks noticed certain profile pictures (ahem and ahem) showing up often in his Twitter timeline. Starks, a consultant with interests in visualization and design, worked through the Twitter API to develop a Processing application to show this behavior in a new and interesting way. Since then, Starks has generated over five dozen graphs comparing how different people use twitter. In December, Starks iterated TweetFreq again and created wtf, a web server written in the new Go programming language.

The tool is particularly helpful when looking at groups, such as popular elected officials, celebrities, influential journalists, and CEOs. TweetFreq adapted quickly to the new lists feature on Twitter, allowing Starks to take any curated list and turn it into a graphic.

The top 10 contributors to the GeekDad blog are also heavy Twitter users (source: Anthony Starks)

To put this to the test, I asked Starks to look at the recent tweeting behavior of our active GeekDad contributors. Specifically, I sent him a list of the 23 authors who posted articles in December and had a known Twitter account, rank ordered by total number of published blog posts. The top ten most prolific boasted 40 or more articles since last April. For good measure, I threw in the main GeekDad account.

“Overall, this is a nice group to show how people use twitter,” says Starks.

He points to the daily rhythm visible in the graphics (see above and below), particularly noticeable with fitzwillie (Ken Denmead) and cebsilver (Curtis Silver). “The GeekDads are fairly prolific,” notes Starks.

The results do show some visible distinction between the most active contributors and their supporting cast. The first group—which accounted for 801 of 1,130 GeekDad blog posts (70.9%) over the last 8 months—uses Twitter more frequently, averaging about 63 tweets each per week compared to just 30 for the other thirteen authors. While this sample came during the holiday season, likely curtailing some online behavior (it did mine), the data suggests an interesting insight: Tweet more, blog more.

The supporting cast for the main GeekDad bloggers don't seem to tweet as much. (source: Anthony Starks)

Using other tools in the Twitter ecosystem (When Did You Join Twitter and Twanalyst), more distinctions seem to arise. The more prolific blogger group creates tweets with slightly higher readability and conversation, retweeting more but posting fewer links. On average, the Geekdads mention other twitterers about one-third of the time and include a link 1 in every 4 tweets.

Less clear is a difference between the adoption dates for the two groups (see below). Four of the ten GeekDads who created their accounts prior to Twitter clearing 1 million accounts in Spring 2008 were Top 10 contributors to this blog. Four of the top authors signed up for the service this past spring.

Some of the power bloggers are Twitter n00bs. (image: Kevin Makice)

For more on the Starks’ TweetFreq project, check out the presentation he published in early November and an explanation of the wtf server setup.

My apologies to authors Brad Moon, Moses Milazzo, Daniel Donahoo, and Tom Angleberger, whose Twitter accounts I couldn’t confirm, and the other GeekDads who didn’t post in December, for their exclusion from this report.