Fortunately my years working in the PC Pro Labs came to the rescue, and before I knew it I’d worked out a scoring system based on Twitter followers, interactivity, quality and quantity of blogs, techie knowledge and sheer amount of fame. Add it all up and out would pop a lovely number, somewhere between 1 and 100.

Naturally, the phrase “out would pop” is entirely untrue. I had to spend a good two weeks following each celebrity, checking for hints of their geekiness, before I could rate them with any authority. Then there was the small matter of trawling through blogs, Facebook accounts and even long-abandoned MySpace pages.

By the end, four men were vying for top position: TV and radio presenter Richard Bacon, comedian Dave Gorman, novelist Neil Gaiman and the inimitable Stephen Fry.

Each of them had something a bit special to offer. Richard Bacon is perhaps responsible for promoting the phenomenon of social networking to a whole section of the British public that might otherwise have remained oblivious to Facebook and Twitter.

Not only does he share pretty much all of his private life via Twitter updates, he also encourages his hundreds of thousands of listeners to tweet him ideas and responses to include in his nightly Radio 5 Live show. When I started my research in early June he had 430,000 followers; that number now stands at an almight 661,345.

Then there’s Dave Gorman. He’s best known for his offbeat BBC2 series The Dave Gorman Collection, where he went on a quest to find other Dave Gormans around the world, but what pushed him into the upper echelons of our tech celeb list was his thorough embracing of Twitter – he uses it to directly communicate with fans, not just for self-promotion – and the quality of his blogs. He’s also a rather mean snapper of digital photos.

Before I reveal our surprise winner – at least to some – let’s talk about Stephen. There’s absolutely no doubt of his strengths. He has excellent technical knowledge, he tweets roughly 7,000 times a day and his Twitter following comes second only to Richard Bacon in our poll, at 655,000 as of today.

He’s also a true celebrity. Everyone knows who Stephen Fry is, at least in the UK, which can’t be said for anyone else in our top five (Charlie Brooker creeps in at this position).

No, what pulls him down is his blogging. Or lack of. Now, technically he still has a blog on the official Stephen Fry website. However, since 2 March he’s made only two posts, and those have been cut-and-paste jobs from a lecture and an already written Guardian piece. It’s a real shame, because he was a witty blogger with an excellent turn of phrase, and the 140-character limit in Twitter isn’t really designed for eloquence.

Bearing in mind that I gave him 0 points for blogging out of a possible 20, it shows how highly he scored in all the areas to even be in our top three – you can see the full top 40 list, and how they got their scores, at the bottom of this blog.

So, to our number one: Neil Gaiman. At this point a hefty percentage of readers will probably be muttering obscenities about this non-entity, but he’s a bona fide celebrity – especially in the States, where he currently lives – and has a rock-star girlfriend to prove it.

But what wins him our top accolade is his voluminous tweets, his interaction with followers (like Dave Gorman, he actually responds!), his excellent blog and the fact that – while he’s no uber geek – he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to technology.

And as you might expect from a man who’s collaborated with Terry Pratchett, he’s also very funny.

To find out more about our Top 10, pick up the latest issue of PC Pro (which also includes a darn fine article about improving your children’s IT skills during the school holidays). And to discover exactly who makes up our top 40, and where they score their points, see below.

Note: click on the table to see the full-size image.

(Lead illustration by Howard McWilliam)

PC Pro’s great Twitter adventure is barely a fortnight old (sign up for our Twitter feed here) but already we’ve found a great number of things that both amaze and annoy us about the micro-blogging site.

Here, in no particular order, are things we like, and can’t stand, about Twitter. Ideas suggested by others on the PC Pro Twitter feed and elsewhere are duly credited in brackets.

GOOD THINGS

1. Simplicity. You sign up, start Tweeting, and the ball’s rolling within minutes. 

2. It’s a brilliant way of breaking news. “It’s almost like the old Telex machines” says senior news reporter, Stu, who’s barely old enough to remember them.

3. It’s good for getting other people to write your presentation for you (DarienGS)

4. Celebrities talk like “real” people without agents/producers/editors getting in the way. And the best Tweeting stars actually interact with their audience. Dave Gorman being a prime example. 

5. Immediacy. 

6. 140-character limit makes you think more about what you’re saying (montemplar)

7. Anyone can do it.

8. Twitter allows people to fire-off inane day-to-day stuff that (hopefully) keeps other channels of communication (email, SMS, blogs) tidier.

9. Variety of ways to access: PC, mobile, multiple apps and widgets. (montemplar)

10. You can stamp personality and bespoke design on profile pages, yet they retain a simple, consistent structure.

11. Trend spotting. Services such as TwitScoop make it easy to spot what’s going on right now. 

12. It’s free.

13. In a world of Flash, Java, Ajax and other attention-hogging wibbles, it’s refreshingly clean.

14. The API – inspired decision to distribute freely has created a million and one different apps, widgets and plug-ins. TweetDeck being our current favourite. 

15. No need for niceities. You cut straight to the point.

16. We’re irrationally pleased when someone we like/respect starts following us.

17. We know what our readers think of us, thanks to TweetDeck search.

18. You’re not constantly bombarded with ads, as with other free services. 

19. That said, it’s an amazingly powerful, well-targeted sales channel. 

20. The man who founded it is called Biz Stone.

BAD THINGS

1. It panders to our short attention spans.

2. Anyone can do it.

3. 140 chr limit makes us all spk like teenagers. FFS. 

4. It quickly becomes an unmanagable flood.

5. It’s another bloody thing to keep up-to-date.

6. Presentation. The site looks like your dad built it, in between putting up shelves and the rugby.

7. The number of companies that suddenly start following you after you mention their products. (parsingphase)

7. Reliability. It’s up and down like Amy Winehouse.

8. Media bandwagon. Sky bloody News has now got a Twitter Correspondent. Hell’s teeth.

9. Fake celeb profiles. Yawn.

10. It’s not (yet) sustainable. Trillions of users, no clear way to make money from them.

11. It’s hard to maintain a professional image.

12. It’s horribly addictive. 

13. Conversations are desperately difficult to follow. 

14. Spambots.

15. We can’t ignore it. Like a sullen puppy, it craves attention.

16. We know what our readers really think of us thanks to TweetDeck search.

17. Someone beat us to pcpro. Grrr.

18. We’re still not sure what the point of it really is.

19. Jargon. RT. Hashtags. Just what the world needed. More things that need explaining. 

20. “New Media” consultants are being paid thousands of pounds per hour to bandy about terms like Twitterverse to gormless corporate morons who are desperate to go Web 2.0. Someone pass the shovel.

“I’m not a violent man but right now I would cheerfully hurt someone from BT,” Gorman writes on his blog. “In fact my sense of proportion has diminished to the point where I can’t work out if it would be in particularly bad taste to suggest that running Kris Marshall over again would be, well, satisfying. Probably.
Still, if he will advertise BT’s services…”

However, what piqued my interest was his superb suggestion of ISPs providing mobile broadband dongles to people whose landlines have given up the ghost: a courtesy connection in the same way garages provide a courtesy car when your runaround is being repaired.

Sadly, it seems BT (which, of course, flogged off its O2 mobile arm years ago) isn’t buying the idea, judging by Goram’s transcript of his conversation with the company’s “support” staff:

Do you want to help me solve the problem?
Yes.
You know those USB modems that provide mobile internet access?
Yes.
One of those would solve the problem wouldn’t it?
um…
Wouldn’t it?
… well…
It would wouldn’t it?
Yes.
So… can you, BT, provide me with one?
No.
Why not?
Because that’s not my department.
So whose department is it?
…um…
Could you put me through to the person who is able to make that decision?
I don’t think anyone can?
Of course they can. It’s possible. The things exist. Someone somewhere makes decisions.
I don’t think that’s how we deal with the problem…
I can see that. But so far you haven’t dealt with the problem. Have you?
um…
Have you?
Well…
It’s still not fixed is it?
No.
You know those USB modems that provide mobile internet access?
Yes.
One of those would solve the problem wouldn’t it?
um…
Wouldn’t it?
… well…
It would wouldn’t it?
Yes.