The Ebb & Flow of South by Southwest

A couple of weeks ago, the masses gathered in Austin, Texas for this years South by Southwest Festival (better known as SXSW). In recent years the ‘Interactive’ portion of the conference has grown in leaps and bounds bringing with it a flood of techies and their toys. Last year two location-based services launched Gowalla and Foursqure – both based on the basic premise that you can check-in on their site, tell it where you are and then your friends and contacts can see where you are/find you.

Needless to say, at a large conference like SXSW (est attendance in the 17,000 range this year) anything that lets you easily locate your friends can be a valuable tool. This year both Gowalla & Fourquare returned with improved apps and a much bigger user base to use them.

So what does this have to do with VizThink? Well, these apps produce a ton of data about where people are, how they’re moving and when they’re on the go. It’s nothing short of a gold mine of data for visualization. As the conference kicked off I wondered aloud on twitter whether anyone would make something of the SXSW migration, and I’m glad to say someone did:

This visualization was put together by the guys at SimpleGeo.com:

This is the data SimpleGeo collected from the eight geolocated data providers (FourSquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Flickr, Bump, Brightkite, BlockChalk, and Fwix) during the South by SouthWest Interactive Festival. The live datastream was available onhttp://austin.vicarious.ly, but we thought people might enjoy a conference retrospective in data.

While this is great, the check-in visualization I really want to see is one that shows the migration of all these people from their home cities towards Austin. There’s probably a 48 hour chunk of data out there that could make a great visual.  ::nudge nudge::

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Article Tags:   checkin, foursquare, gowalla, sxsw, sxswi, vidseo

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  • http://twitter.com/robert__T robert tellier

    cool visualization

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  • http://www.perceptualedge.com/ Stephen Few

    I took the time to watch the South by Southwest video above. Based on this “retrospective in data,” am I correct in assuming that the conference was about electronic music and flashing dots on an unreadable map? That's the total amount of information that I was able to derive from the video. What more were you expecting people to get from this? Data visualizations should tell a story in clear and accurate terms. Unless the story was “lots of dots,” this visualization fails. When readers make comments such as “cool visualization” and “pretty sweet look at social media”, what criteria are they using to determine that something is cool or sweet? For this community to contribute meaningfully to the world, it will need to set its standards higher and begin to measure the effectiveness of the work it produces. This stuff is fun, but is it useful and does it work? These are questions that ought to be asked and pondered long and hard.

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