Jacob Harris from the OPEN blog at the NYT surmounted the difficulty of tracking links posted with URL shorteners on Twitter, and figured out the newspaper's articles are tweeted at an impressive rate of once every 4 seconds.

Because most people who tweet articles utilize URL shorteners like bit.ly, for example, measuring how many tweets are devoted to NYT stories can be quite difficult. The complex process of counting the tweets is explained in great detail by Harris - from using Twitter streaming API to grouping tweets by minute - on the blog.

Although these figures reveal the growing importance of Twitter as a way to distribute news content online, Twitter drives only 1% of traffic to both US and UK newspapers' websites, according to Malcolm Coles and Adam Sherk.

So, even though people are tweeting 17 Times' articles per minute which is significant and shows a lot of potential, Twitter still does not represent a big traffic driver for US newspapers.