Guest post by Light Collective's Martin Lupton. Update: see here for part II of the Top Ten. 
A few weeks ago we came across a blog article that listed the ten most influential lighting designers on Twitter. The blog post is three years old so we've taken the initiative and updated the list based on our own limited and completely biased experience with Twitter and the many cool people in the lighting industry we follow.
The people below are a selection of the lighting designers we follow who share great content and information. We rate them highly and they follow our main rule: don't always tweet about yourself and tweet/re-tweet about other stuff (events, products, exhibitions, installations...) going on in the lighting industry if it reaches the appropriate level of interest and coolness. The 'Top 10' concept is always good for a bit of discussion and controversy, so thanks to Urban Cottage Industries for hosting our words on their lovely blog. When it comes down to it, this is a bit of fun really, hopefully no-one is too offended but if you think we've missed you out and should include you next time then Tweet us: @LightCollective!
1. Chiara Carucci
@PassoLuce - if anyone deserves your follow then its Chiara - one of the industry's up-and-coming stars. Chiara has become the ambassador for Light Related Organisations with the International Year of Light (IYL). She's taking the word of what we all do and making sure it's represented in the IYL agenda. What's really amazing is that she is doing this from a grassroots level, not representing any formal organisation or company and with minimum resources. Go Chiara!2. Rachel Nichols
@Little_Lumen - from living above the chip shop round the corner from Sharon, the always smiling Rachel has packed up her lighting talent and headed off to Australia. But that hasn't stopped her being a useful person to follow on Twitter and her frequent re-tweets of cool creative web finds are always welcome - her 2,000 odd followers can't be wrong, can they? When are you coming back Rachel?3. Jonathan Rush
@rushjonathan - a little closer to home and an ex-colleague of Little_Lumen with a similarly impressive number of followers. Jonathan often tweets the random lighting finds he sees out and about or on testing his own projects. A view into the life and light of a London based architectural lighting designer.4. Roberto Corradini
@RobCorradiniLD - known to us in Light Collective as the tallest man in lighting, Roberto is the second Italian in our top ten. There must be something in the water out there that makes these guys so active. A collaborator with Chiara on some initiatives and he was part of the team that set up Italian Lighting Design promotion group on Facebook which has an impressive 4,143 members!5. Iain Ruxton
@Iainlightsstuff - combining a (sometimes) enviable level of geeky lighting knowledge with a healthy dose of dry Scottish sarcasm Iain is always opinionated, usually entertaining, often amusing and occasionally genius. Follow him to get his thoughts on light and also find out what plane he is on and why the service is shit! Note - he does swear occasionally... you have been warned.Now, if we want to look at these seriously then maybe we should include some metrics - number of followers, tweet rates, etc and we recently discovered there is something known as Social Authority. If you want to know more check it out here. If we look at this for our first three Twitter super-stars of lighting you can see that although @PassoLuce has the lowest number of followers by far she does have the highest authority but whats really amazing to us, is that in the small and largely unknown world of lighting these three people have the ability to address a combined audience of 3,257 people!
Want to see which lighting designers are are covered in Part 2? Follow us on Twitter - @LightCollective - to get the tip off when it's live.
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