In my continuing series of odd little posts about odd little twitter-related applications, I feel obliged to announce twittersheep.

The idea is that your twitter followers represent your flock, and that your twitter sheep are represented by their twitter bios. This then produces a word cloud (c.f. wordle and similar applications) so you can see who exactly is making up your flock.

Obviously, the more people your flock consists of, the more detailed and interesting your word picture will be. Mine is still somewhat sparse so you all need to follow @ThePickards so I can get a more interesting picture, okay? If you want to look at how it looks with a few more, take a look at @glinner’s flock.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of people following each other around like sheep, I am now keeping a count of one particular follower. We’ll call him Al for now. He’s started to follow me four times by my count, only he drops me after a few days (as I am not following him back) and then starts again. I feel he is somewhat missing the point.

Twitter is supposed to be a method for exchanging small snippets of information that are relevant or amusing to you. I am not going to turn it into any kind of pissing contest based on the number of followers I have or haven’t got, I am not going to follow people to try and get them to follow me back, and I am not going to follow someone simply because they follow me (although I do check who is following me semi-regularly and check their twitter streams to see if I want to follow them).