Photocredit: (CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us.

A young and relatively unknown media figure was crowned the “Most influential Twitter User” in Britain, The Telegraph reported yesterday. CEO of the media and technology blog Mashable, Pete Cashmore, 24, beat out British comedian and Twitter junkie Stephen Fry, who has more than 1 million followers and whose tweets have been the subject of much ink lately, reported The Mail.

Cashmore started building Mashable, a blog devoted entirely to news about social media, in 2005, out of his bedroom at his parent’s home in Banchory, near Aberdeen. Now, the blog generates seven-figure revenues and has offices all around the world, reported The Mail, and attracts more than 7 million monthly page views, and has 1.5 million followers on Twitter and 50,000 fans on Facebook. The site employs 15 fulltime bloggers and 50 regular contributors.

Cashmore says Twitter and Facebook have managed to increase engagement among the users of different media. “That’s made blogs like ours much more ‘sticky’ – there’s more activity going on, more comments, and people are becoming used to having feedback,” he told The Telegraph.

Cashmore, who now divides his time between San Francisco and the UK, has more than 1.8 million followers on Twitter. He’s been known to tweet breaking news stories from Mashable and start open discussions on them; his tweets have been popular because they discuss technology in the context of everyday life with issues such as shopping, music and social networking, said The Mail.

The most influential ranking list was compiled by mobile phone maker INQ. This “influence” rating was determined by the number of tweets, how often they re-tweeted other’s messages and how often their posts were re-tweeted by others, reported The Mail. Other big stars on the list were Russell Brand at third place, Jonathan Ross at number eight and Peter Andre coming in at number 10. Sarah Brown, wife of Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was the most influential British political figure on Twitter, at number 14, beating London’s mayor Boris Johnson, who came in at number 18 on the list.

Read the full list of UK’s most influential people on Twitter