More about the IA Summit - #ias09

I recently attended the Information Architecture Summit 2009 in Memphis. As a research and analysis geek, I was interested to learn a little more about how folks contributed to and shared about the event. This group loves to twitter, briefly appearing on its' Top Ten list during the nexus of the conference.

#ias09 is the twitter hashtag for the Summit. (Ironically, the official hashtag was IAS2009 but it never caught on because it was "too long" to type in repeatedly. Funny how the masses can overrule official decisions. I'm sure there's some analysis in that as well).

I went on to ManyEyes and uploaded some data. Here it is:



This represents all tweets with #ias09 from the beginning up until 3/25/09 that appear on twitterscan.com.

Is it comprehensive? I copied all #ias09 entries that showed up there.

Is it reliable? I don't know... is twitterscan reliable? Maybe the masses can comment on that.

Is it interesting? I think so! But I'm a data geek. For example. "@whitneyhess" is the most common term here. "@whitneyhess" means that her's was the most reffered to twitter handle associated with #IAS09. This is different from "whitneyhess", which would mean that she was the most frequent twitterer for #ias09. That honor goes to @bnunnally.

Even more interesting is that "whitneyhessing" is now a verb. As in "mediajunkie: @bnunnally Thanks for whitneyhessing this talk!..."

Here is some artwork from http://www.wordle.net. It's the same data, in a prettier format.
Words can clue us in to many things. I like to call them the keyhole to the mind, as they literally show underlying constructs and themes to how we approach and think about things. We don't often realize this, or take advantage of it, but when we notice it, we get some powerful input!


References:
Many Eyes - Data viz tool for the masses
http://www.wordle.com - word art
Twitter
Information Architecture Summit