• LastHistory » Visualizing Last.fm Listening Histories and Personal Streams – LastHistory allows you to analyze music listening histories from Last.fm through an interactive visualization and to explore your own past by combining the music you listened to with your own photos and calendar entries.
• BBC – BBC Internet Blog: A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services – An interesting look into the way the BBC deal with their Digital branding and site development, to keep everything looking similiar.
• Foodspotting / SXSX 2010 FREE Food Noms! – Tastespotting are publishing a list of places to find free food suring SXSW – checkout their twitter @sxswfreenoms
• Guardian graphics visualising BBC spending – With all the furore over potential BBC spending cuts, just how much does the 6 Music, and Asian Network radio station really cost – and how much is that of the BBC budget. Just take a look at this simple, but insightful visualisation
• The State of the Internet – JESS3 – The State of the Internet, a video by JESS3 – showing the facts about the online world of the internet
• Information is beautiful: The BBC-O-Gram – An infographic showing the BBC, in all it's disparate ways – and where the money goes. Another good display by the team at The Guardian
• Information is beautiful: 30 examples of creative infography – This is a beautiful set showing how creative an infographic can be, pretty inspiring.
• http://infochimps.org/ – Looking for a dataset, take a look at one of the widest collections of the worlds datasets.
• Oracle 10G – SQL for Modeling – Now it starts getting a bit more complex, I'll write a dummies guide approach. But basically, you are able to 'model' the output of your data, based on a predefined set of rules.
• Oracle 10G – SQL for Analysis and Reporting – Oracle® Database Data Warehousing Guide – SQL For Analysis and Reporting.
  So we are all aware of the plain, Select, From, Where etc. But how about the advanced analytics. Worth a read through, to extend those SQL Skills

From talking to SXSW veterans I can tell that this is going to be an interesting experience. There is a lot going on, from the panels, conversations, networking opportunities, parties and of course food.

That said, I’m slightly concerned about having the time to get some food, anyone who knows me will know that I’m a bit of a ‘foodie’. At the other end of the spectrum, is how do I take the best notes.

Every panel and keynote at SXSWi will end up as a podcast, so that covers having a verbatim copy of what was said [but these can be put up months after the events]. Instead does one go with slate, paper, or laptop.

I’m thinking laptop will be the winner, from an ‘immediacy’ point of view, and being able to quickly add and edit as I go (and no need to re-transcribe across).

The only real unknown, is how loud the speaker systems are – as with my hearing, it’s likely I won’t be able to hear much – unless I’m in a ‘prime’ position [read: near a speaker stack]. If they aren’t loud, then I’ll definitely be needing to rethink my approach to the event!

I’ll report back after the event, as to what I’ve learnt from a tip perspective, as well as any notes I manage to take!

I’ve always been interested in ‘Where Twitter Might Go’ – both from their infrastructure, staffing and the future products/services they may be rolling out. Thanks to Twitter opening up a job site, we can get a picture as to what they are planning to do in the future.

The obvious is regarding monetisation, it’s taken a while but there are now ‘official’ rumours that some form of an ‘ad platform’ will be launched at SXSWi next month where Evan Williams, the Twitter CEO will be one of the Keynote speakers.

This is backed up, by the fact they are actively recruiting for product marketing, and software engineers to work on monetisation.

What’s more interesting, to me, is the other jobs on offer. Especially regarding data analysts, and data visualisation. Just recently Twitter mentioned that the twittersphere are tweeting at a rate of 50,000 times a day.

That’s a lot of data being put out there, a lot of opportunity for text semantics, trend analysis, and harvesting the information. Which makes sense for Twitter to be after data analysts etc. Though the fact they are actively moving into the visualisation market is interesting. Below is a visual they made at the time of the Superbowl, tracking both mentions of the Superbowl, and contextual analysis around the brands being mentioned.

To me, the combination of their active recruitment in these two areas is an indicator that they may be releasing in the future, a tool that allows for the contextual and semantic analysis of Your Brand, they are slowly rolling out corporate tools (like being able to say who a Tweet was attributed to without having to use ^NH etc)

Who knows what the future might look like, I’ve got my ideas, and got my own side projects!

It’s been used to produce some pieces of analysis on this blog, and I use it regularly for work. What’s great is that alongside their latest commercial release, is that they unveiled Tableau Public. This is a free version, that allows you to download the software, create your analysis and deploy it to their web servers.

You can then grab the embed code, and display visualisations on your blog; which people can then interact with. This platform takes it one step further than just a static image. It’s on par with IBM ManyEyes, but doesn’t use java and, to me at least, is much easier and intuitive to use.

The product has the same feature set as the commercial version, with the only limitations being a 100,000 row limit and restricted data sources.

So for those who have chastised me for using ‘expensive’ software before, don’t worry – you can have a go with one of the latest challengers on the block, as according to Gartner.

P.S. There is an obvious lack of a Tableau Public embedded chart in this post, that is because it does not support the Apple platform. Damn. Instead, here is one they produced:

SXSW Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer.

The alternative viewpoint is:

SXSWi is the school skiing trip to Austria: all the cool kids go on it at Easter and then talk incessantly about until the summer holidays.

I’ve got the essentials: pass, flights, hotel sorted. Want to know what sort of things are going on, then take a look at the Schedule to get an idea about the types of keynotes, panels, workshops and parties that will be occurring.

It’s my first time, and no doubt will be quite an experience, I’ll be after any tips and handy advice from the ’seasoned pros’ (or at least people who have been before). Let me know what you wish you would have known first time round etc.

Two (of many) panels that caught my eye include:

Data is Money: How Geeks are Changing Finance
Cooking for Geeks: Science, Hacks, & Good Food

The current thoughts are to take Day 1 ‘easy’, and to ensure that I’ve got ‘backups’ of panels – as undoubtedly I’ll either get time sidetracked, lost etc.

What else should I know about, get prepared for, bring with?

• Twitter / Working at Twitter – Twitter are after recruiting people to assist with Data Visualisation – just shows a peak into what they may be thinking for the future.
• New car park in illegal parking hotspot | birminghamnewsroom.com – Birmingham City Council announce new parking area in most ticketed street – interesting to note thst a carpark will be in place which will still equal tickets (as per Livery St Carpark, the second most ticketed spot in 2008-2009 in Birmingham)
• An Annual Report on One Man’s Life – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – The NYTimes talks to Feltron, about his annual life reports.
• Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms – A Gartner report, detailing the players within the Business Intelligence Market. I'm a fan of Tableau, from an analysis and ad-hoc point of view, and they get some good coverage. Alongside other more familiar, and unfamiliar vendors. Worth a scan through.
• Nicholas Felton | Feltron.com – Nicholas Feltron Report for 2009 – His life, as an infographic. Also take a look at the others that have been produced since 2006.

Luckily I’ve had access to the site whilst it was in private testing, and am able to get an insight into the development world through an associated email group.

The simple thing is, YES it’s great – opening up data, for reuse, how could it not be.

Though NO, it’s not ‘great for the general public end user’. By that I mean, the general public will almost indoubtly benefit due to the applications and products that get developed due to this openness and transparency of data.

For instance, want to know Where Does Your Money Go. This was a concept that was developed through the Show Us A Better Way competition – a precursor, and almost a proof of concept that opening up data is good for us all.

So whilst the outputs are likely to be interesting, I don’t think its necessarily going to be top of every UK citizens todo list to checkout http://data.gov.uk often.

There are a lot of good things that have already come from the site, and this Top 10 Government Data Visualisations from the Guardian demonstrates just some of the talent out there .

I’ll certainly be looking at what is coming out utilising the data available, what mashups get made and such. Meanwhile I need to tune up my Ruby, RDF, SPARQL, etc knowledge to be able to take full advantage. I just don’t think that Joe Public will be doing that.

Maybe I’m just wrong?

• Visualisations Applications – A huge resource of services, links and other related visualisations tools.
• Redesigning the Boarding Pass – Journal – Boarding Pass / Fail – Showing how a boarding pass could be redesigned, to allow for clearer understanding and conveying of the important information.
• Crayon | Luxirare – An interesting mix of food and design.
• Andy Huntington Interaction & Sound » Datadecs – For Christmas 2009 the Really Interesting Group wanted to create a a gift comprising a series of 4 unique decorations based on each recipient’s use of the Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm and Twitter. Having used a couple of the software APIs they were thinking about using (flickr and dopplr) and with experience of rapid prototyping we worked together to turn the data into something physical.
• 9 Ways to Visualize Proportions – A Guide | FlowingData – A nice post about size, and proportions in graphics.

So what was it all about?

Hackitude is a two-day hacking event based around your ideas. Non-techie-types can suggest ideas for things they’d like to see made, and hackers can setup or join working groups to make those ideas a reality.

Anyone could suggest an idea (or more than one), that they think is something that is missing in the online world. All the ideas are on the site, so take a browse – could you help build one of them in the future?

We chose to work on one by Dave Harte, which involved letting the public know where allotments where and what facilities they had etc.

I was popping in and out through the evening, but alongside Jamie Garner, but my main task was to help devise the data structure/model that the backend should work on.

The concept was to make it as flexible as possible, allowing us for instance to use the same database, and site, to pull out information on local cafes and facilities, or pubs with wifi etc.

Here is a video shot by Nat, of Aquila TV, of Jamie and myself explaining it (this was taken at around 1AM – so I’m not looking too fresh!)

I had other commitments through the weekend, but popped in a few times to help see how it was progressing and helping/hindering others along the way.

What came out of it was a remarkable system, which can be seen on the Metalocal site. It quickly shows the data, and filters based off what facilities your require.

Only a small subset of data is within the system, but its testament to all that it got done in the space of the weekend.

What do you think? Know of any other cool ideas like this?

P.S. Have a giggle at this: