• Network&Society – Redrawing the map of Great Britain from a network of human interactions. <br />
  Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space? This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions.
• Rank « Gareth Holt – A series of 13 charts and graphs produced with Ben Branagan for the UK traveling exhibition ‘Rank’: Picturing The Social Order 1516 – 2009. Commissioned by curator Alistair Robinson and exhibited at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Leeds.
• http://bokardo.com/archives/the-behavior-youve-designed-for/ – I’ve given a few talks recently and by far and away the one idea that is resonating with people is the idea that the behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for
• Metricly – Aggregated Dashboards for Every Business – Dive deep into your data<br />
  With your data in one place, Metricly provides a consistent and powerful set of tools to analyze your metrics – with subtotals, rollups, filters, and insights that help you take action.
• Muddy – Muddy is an indexing and categorisation tool for use by people and companies with lots of content. Using information derived from Wikipedia, Muddy finds notable people, places and organisations in any webpage,

• Help Me Investigate – anatomy of an investigation | Online Journalism Blog – Paul Bradshaw and Andy Brightwell conducted some research into one of the successful investigations on the crowdsourcing platform Help Me Investigate. This looks at how that investigation worked, and might assist others.
• Data-as-a-Service: Factual, InfoChimps & Google Squared: Business Collaboration News « – In 2004, Tim O’Reilly’s famous Web 2.0 manifesto suggested that “data would be the next Intel Inside,” and that any Internet service of significance would be underpinned by specialized datasets, such as Amazon’s product database or Foursquare’s places.
• MediaPost Publications Times Offers Details On ‘Metered-Model’ During Earnings Call 10/20/2010 – Meanwhile, the so-called "metered model" will allow readers who are referred from third-party sites such as blogs, social media networks and search engines access to specific content "without triggering the gate, which will preserve NYTimes.com's significant reach and advertising inventory," according to Robinson.
• Can Twitter predict the stock market? – A new research study suggests that comments posted on the social networking site Twitter can predict swings in the US Dow Jones market.
• Big Money for Companies That Can Analyze Big Data – As data volumes skyrocket, startups looking to take advantage of the opportunity in Big Data need to focus on the art of statistical-learning algorithms, says Michael Driscoll, founder of Dataspora

A schedule that means I’m never sure where I am more than a week in advance, means that I’ve been a bit bad at keeping in touch. I’m sorry for all the meetings, catchups and coffees I’ve meant to have had as of late, it’s just a bit hard to cram everything in (and do nothing some days) when I’m back in Birmingham!

As well as ‘proper’ work, I’ve been kept busy with a few side projects.

• Kitecrowd has grown over the last two months to achieving aroun37,000 unique visitors for each month. Further detailed breakdowns can be seen here. It’s great to see the community grow, and be nurtured by the great moderation team. It’s also doing well at becoming sustainable cost wise, with advertisers coming on board
• YetAnotherGin has been really attracting the traffic, last month it saw over 2,000 unique visitors, a whole 1,000 visitors up from the previous month! There has been some great feedback, interactions with brand PR companies, many a cocktail imbibed too.
• I decided to make a ‘web app’ and created an online spirits, wine, champagne price comparison site: Tipplepicker, it’s still very early days but a lot of the core functionality is there.

I also found out that a talk/proposal for SXSW that I submitted did get through to the ‘PanelPicker’ stage, but alas not in the first draw of items for the schedule (there is the potential it could still go ahead though!). You can read the proposal, as it’s online: ‘Online Communities, Get Them Growing, and Money Making‘.

I don’t know when I’ll be back settled in one place for a more consistant time, but hopefully I will be. After all I’m writing this in a hotel room, on my seventh trip to Prague in four months. It will be great to see the Birmingham faces on a more regular basis, but hey I’ll still be around on Twitter.

• 5 Interesting Data Articles | blog.infochimps.org – Inspired by Pete Warden’s Five Short Links, we decided we’d put up a post about the most interesting data articles we’ve come across in the recent months.
• 30Days to context connection – PDF – A 30 day calendar of useful visualisation, and other learning aides.
• The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook – A nice segmented chart showing how privacy has chnaged over time on Facebook.
• Social circle and content – Google – Google Social Search / Circle
• Nicholas Felton’s Master Class – Nicholas Felton's Master Class – Visual notes, interesting insights on how the Annual reports evolved and onto how to create your own data visualisations.

• Google – General Elections 2010 – From Google, some good coverage of UK websites (Openly Local etc). Britain is going to the polls, and the internet is a great resource to help you make your decision. Quickly find out your MP and candidates below, with links to their blogs and Twitter pages. Then explore further, with fun and interesting election sites from around the web.
• Magazine Preview – The Data-Driven Life – NYTimes.com – An interesting look at people who track their life in great detail.
• About – trst.me – trst.me measures user reputation in a way far more robust than counting the number of followers. The basic idea is to look at how many people interact with you and give you their attention, weighted by how many people interact and pay attention to them
• Eddy – Stame Design – Eddy is a media aggregation platform built for the public display of up-to-the-minute activity on realtime services like Twitter. It was used by Stamen to curate the NBC Olympic coverage, pretty interesting.
• What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? – WWW’10 – Research into Twitter, based off crawling the user network and looking at relationships. Touching on the thoughts of influence.

• @anywhere prototypes from the Guardian – Some interesting prototypes of the @anywhere system, as publically first revealed at SXSW, by the Guardian. Native twitter features, like hovercards, in third party sites. interesting
• 3D Interfaces – Got a set of data, with complex linked relationships. A demo of a strategy to deal with the connections when displayed in a 3D environment
• JESS3 Blog: SXSW Vicarious.ly Visualization – Amazing look at patterns and trends seen when running through location enabled data from SXSW.
• Chart Chooser by Juice Analytics: Download Tufte-compliance Excel and PowerPoint charts – Want to create a graph? Not got a copy of Tableau. Take a look at some of the Excel templates, that are presented in a 'nice way'
• Graphical perception – learn the fundamentals first | FlowingData – When it comes to visualization, especially on the Web, you have to be open-minded, and you should be willing to try new things. There’s no advancing otherwise. However, before you dive into the advanced stuff – like just about everything in your life – you have to learn the fundamentals before you know when you can break the rules.

• Main : Stefanie Posavec – Take a quick look over the site of Stefanie Posavec, some interesting pieces of work are present. Including her cover for the new OK GO album.
• LukeW | Web App Masters: Design Lessons from 350 Million – An interesting set of points that Facebook have learnt from over time, with applicable transfer to other peoples sites, including Kitecrowd.
• London – South of the River Tube Stations – What if most the tube stations were in south london? This is a nice simple visualisation.
• Foursquare Introduces New Tools for Businesses – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Foursquare, the location app are rolling out new features to businesses, who will be able to see a range of real-time data about Foursquare usage.
• Google – Public Data – The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings.

As I have mentioned before, the schedule is busy, stupidly so, punishing so. As you can see from below, there always would be, and there were, scheduling clashes.

I managed to pre-filter some of these down to a ‘top five’ or even ‘top seven’, and in some cases I ignored my pre-selected items to go for something that caught my eye. In the majority of the sessions I took notes, but I’m not going to bore you all with the details of what went on. Instead, I’m noting down what sessions I attended (mainly for my own benefit), and will be linking to my notes where appropriate. [This is to come, once I've tidied them up -bookmark and checkback if interested]

As with any event with hundreds, or thousands, of other people in the room there will be a plethora of coverage on the net. I’ll try and link to the presenters notes, the twitter backchannel, and any other blog post coverage etc – so if my notes are a tad shoddy you (and I) can see what other people got out of the sessions.

Friday
Smackdown: Consumers Privacy vs. Advertiser Revenue (OK)
What Are Analytics? A Guide To Practical Data (Mediocre)
Cooking For Geeks: Science, Hacks & Good Food (Fun)

Saturday
We F*cked Up: Happy Cog and Friends, Exploring Failures, Together (Great)
Playing with Place: Location-Based Games and Services (Walkout)
Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity (Amazing)
BBC Digital Planet Live at SXSW (OK)
Booze Blogging: Liquid Conversation (Great)

Sunday
Why You Aren’t Done Yet (Amazing)
Ditch the Old to Build Your Dream Life (Walkout)
Fans, Friends & Followers: Creating Your Own Cult (of the Non-Apocalyptic Variety) (Great)
Search Patterns: Tangible Futures For Discovery (OK)

Monday
The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions (Amazing)
Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends
REPO MEN: Extending a Movie’s Narrative Online (Interesting)
The Next Generation of Social Media – Keynote with Evan Williams and Umair Haque (OK, part watched)
Beyond the Desktop: Embracing New Interaction Paradigms (Interesting)

Tuesday
Great British Breakfast (Decent)
Pervasive Games and Playful Experiences: Rendering the Real World (Interesting)
Swarming Plato’s Cave: Rethinking Digital Fantasies (OK)
The Future of Music Delivery – Keynote Interview with Daniel El and Eliot Van Buskirk (Interesting)
Interactive Infographics (Fascinating)
Closing Remarks by Bruce Sterling

As you can see it’s been pretty jampacked, there were a few times to relax and miss a session for a well rested recuperation lunch. There are only so many times that you can eat meals that solely contain of a snackbar, or free hotdog. In such times, silliness sometimes occurred such as Surprised Lego Kitty (there was a whole corner piled with Lego in the convention centre) and Audioboobs appeared. Or getting ready for the UK Olympic Shuffleboard drafting. Plus, sunshine breaks on the terrace are always a welcome change.

The list at the top is just the daytime sessions, the evenings were varied. From networking meals, Dorkbot, Nuclear Tacos, seeing Motorhead play, getting driven around the place looking for parties, or watching We Are Scientists at the closing party. Too much to go into here, buy me a drink and I’m sure I can regale some story!

You can take a look at some of pictures on my Flickr stream.

• 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

• 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.