With everyone from "Meet The Press" moderator David Gregory to Sen. John McCain suddenly fiending for Twitter, it didn’t take long before the media came up with a bevy of cute puns and, just as quickly, top 10 lists of the most vital political feeds to follow. The Los Angeles Times and Politico have so far sounded off with their own rankings of top feeds, but the geek world hasn't been much impressed.

Washington social media expert Nick O’Neill used his blog to dismiss the Politico top 10 as “an arbitrary list which was highly effective linkbait.” Politico's list included influential politicians, such as Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Al Gore, but real-world cred doesn’t necessarily translate into tweets.

The Times created its ranking based on the number of people signed up to read each twitterer's posts -- essentially equating Twitter "followers” with the much-ballyhooed contest to rake in “Facebook friends” during the presidential campaign. Government consultant Mark Drapeau took to his blog to call this “an even worse list” than Politico’s. So he wrote up his own based on “my own experiences and some private polling of the Twitter community.” Fellow blogger O’Neill made that list. Karl Rove did not.

So what is a Twitter newbie -- like one of the congressmen who didn’t type their way through President Obama’s speech -- supposed to do? How are they supposed to know what they’re missing or who to emulate?

That’s where sites such as Twitalyzer are supposed to step in. Appended into a sortable graphic below are nominees from all three polls, with each person scored by Twitalyzer’s formula for determining an individual’s actual “influence.” NPR’s politics feed, first cited by the Times, scored highest when the numbers were crunched last week.

The site uses four measures to determine who's a good member of the Twitterati (a derisive term coined by the Valleywag blog). Retweeting someone else’s comment earns points for “generosity.” Replying to someone’s thoughts betters your “signal-to-noise” ratio, as does linking to interesting stories or posts elsewhere on the Web. Just tweeting like crazy will up your “velocity” score. But most important to the Washington set is probably “clout,” which measures the number of times people reference you.

Twitalyzer accounts for what Chris McCroskey, who is one of the founders of TweetCongress.org, says the top 10 lists have failed to account for -- the medium’s “two-way” nature. All of the lists left out Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, who he says is a “rock star” on Twitter.

“I don't think anyone else on Twitter gets Twitter as much as John Culberson does,” McCroskey said. “He is a Republican, but he will talk to anybody about using the technology.”

McCroskey compares the site to the conversations that used to happen at work around water coolers -- if those conversations took place in real time as events happened and not the day after. Traffic spiked at TweetCongress, which aggregates posts from every member of Congress onto its Web site, while Obama gave his speech to Congress and then again a few days later when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave it his try.

McCain, Rove and NPR all rated the maximum “clout” score, as did reporter Ana Marie Cox, ABC “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos and Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. Obama didn’t rate highly because his posts have dropped off since the campaign. McCain, for his part, has seen his number of followers skyrocket during the last week and now has 10th-highest influence score of anyone being tracked by Twitalyzer.

Steve Lunceford manages GovTwit.com, which lists every government agency with a Twitter presence. He makes no effort to rate the departments most important to follow.

“It's going to differ for each individual,” he said, explaining that deciding who to follow is “personal” and depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. “There is no right or wrong way to use Twitter.”

That doesn’t erase the fact that there’s a general lack of “generosity” among Washington’s elite. They scored an average of just 5.4 out of 100.

SOURCE: TWITALYZER.COM REPORTS RUN WEEK OF MARCH 2