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Here’s an attempt to get quite a bit deeper into Twitter than the previous 60-second video cram course.

How individuals influence others in online environments has always been a fascinating aspect of the social Web. Twitter’s structure provides some new perspectives of how influence works, but it may not be as obvious as the follower-followee dynamic suggests.

The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter is a report written and released by the Web Ecology Project. Based on a  10-day trial based on 12 Twitter accounts, the authors look deeper into how individual Tweeters gain influence in the micro-blogging environment. Small sample, but a good start in terms of testing a new methodology.

And, no, they didn’t really find a definitive metric of influence. It remains elusive.

An attempt to define a universal concept of influence on the Web remains difficult, because we must account for the variations of platforms, fluidity of environments, and evolving behaviors of users online. Because each platform is different, this report will rely on a definition of online influence specific to the environment of Twitter. Therefore, we define influence on Twitter as the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user. The term user is defined by Twitter’s platform. The term action deserves further explanation.

Understanding the term action as it relates to influence on Twitter depends on the fundamental structure of ideas in the environment and how these ideas move. The fundamental unit of content on Twitter is the tweet (a user may type up to 140 characters and publish them to the web interface), so an action on Twitter comprises all interactions of a user and that unit of content (tweet). While we can analyze various types of influential actions (eg., a view on YouTube or a like on Facebook), this report will primarily focus on actions specific to Twitter. Our analysis of influence on Twitter, then, relies on the understanding of how actions shape behavior on the platform.