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Gallery

Britain's top 10 tech celebs

Posted on 7 Aug 2009 at 15:39

9. Graham Linehan (SCORE:58)
If you work in IT support you may have mixed feelings about The IT Crowd, which Graham Linehan wrote, but only Irish Catholics without a sense of humour could fail to laugh at Father Ted (which he co-wrote).
Graham's tweets tend to raise a smile rather than a belly laugh (if you want those, and don't find chest hair too annoying, try Russell Brand (rustyrockets) instead), but are worth following as he's very good at directing people to good stories. He's a fan of American satire site The Onion, as are we at PC Pro.

Video clips litter his blog too, and we'd be more impressed by the 17 posts he made in May if the majority weren't just embedded links. We were also a little disappointed that he didn't make any effort to reply to comments on his blog, although he's likely to reply if you message him via Twitter.

10. Jamie Oliver (SCORE: 56)

There's no doubting Jamie Oliver's celebrity status, although you can't help but suspect that almost as many people get wound up by the geezer from Essex as those who love his cooking and philanthropy. Either way, his Google profile is right up there with the best, with half-a-million UK pages mentioning his name.

He has to make do with a mere 110,000 followers on Twitter, though, and although he's made more than 1,000 tweets since joining in early January, that's five times fewer than fellow celeb Philip Schofield, who joined at the same time.

Perhaps that's a reflection of the fact Jamie is rushing round kitchens making "pukka" food, while Philip sits at home stroking puppies and smiling. And to the TV chef's credit he does respond to his followers each day. But what really lets Jamie down is that we haven't seen any evidence that he's a geek at all. He appears to be more concerned with apple pie than Apple Macs. Weird.

BRITAIN'S TOP FEMALE GEEK

Gail Porter
You don't have to be a statistician to notice there are no ladies in our top ten, and only six in the top 40. This isn't too surprising, but what did surprise us was how different the tone of a female tweet was compared to a male tweet.

Gail Porter, the top-placed woman at number 17, is an excellent example of this. She shares intimacies that few men would ever consider putting online, including "fluff updates" to report on new hair growth as she battles with alopecia areata, and in some ways uses her 13,000 followers as a support group.

She confirmed her geek credentials while presenting The Gadget Show as replacement for Suzi Perry (number 22), where she showed an astonishing level of enthusiasm for technology.

HOW WE JUDGE THE WINNERS

We clearly spend too much time in the Labs here at PC Pro. Rather than follow gut instinct and pluck scores out of the air for our celebrity top 10, we decide our winners based on as many objective measurements as we could - and throw in a few subjective ones for good measure.

For the Twitter score, we award points based on the number of followers each celeb has, how often they post and how interactive they are. The blogging score takes into account the frequency and length of blog posts made via Facebook, MySpace or their own website, and whether they get involved in the comments.

To decide each celebrity's fame status, we run a search on Google UK for their name. This isn't as simple as it seems, as beautiful ladies get many more mentions than men, while other factors - such as a BBC blog or a common name (think David Mitchell) - can boost results.
The most subjective score is for each celebrity's geekiness. This is based on any technical knowledge they've shown, the number of tech mentions in their tweets and our overall perceptions of them.

With a potential 30 Twitter points, 20 for blogs, 25 for geekiness and 25 for fame, the overall score is the celebrity's accumulated total.

Read our top 40 chart for a more comprehensive rundown.

Illustrations by Howard McWilliam

Author: Tim Danton