Round 19: Behold the penultimate round at GDC!That's right, Backchatter is now free software! After my colleagues and I at Local No. 12 wrapped up the game the Game Developers Conference this spring, we made the whole thing open source. You can find it on our SourceForge page. And check out our freshly completed documentation.

Behold the penultimate round at GDC!

Here is the latest in my continuing series on analyzing Twitter conference backchannels by their hashtags and replies/retweets. This one, though, is a bit different and special... because I was actually at the conference! Below is my breakdown of Games + Learning + Society 2009 via the #gls and #gls09 hashtags.

Pretty excited to be in Madison--it's a really beautiful town. I'm at GLS 09 for the week to check out the latest and greatest in my little field. I'll be presenting with Dave Birchfield and Katie tonight for the SMALLab poster session, and I'm running a game with Colleen, Eric Zimmerman, and John Sharp using twitter called BACKCHATTER which should be a lot of fun to play.

If you're around, I'm the tall scruffy one in the lime green shirt!

Because I've recently been... let's just come out and say obsessed with looking at the social relationships that seem to emerge from examining sociograms of Twitter users within the "channel" of a particular hashtag, here's another one I thought was interesting: Media in Transition 6, a.k.a. #mit6.

The subgraph of the largest strongly connected component for Media in Transition 6.

Just a quick post about another conference's Twitter backchannel I analyzed recently. Take a look at my posts on #swineflu and #09ntc to get a full picture of what I'm up to here. Basically, I'm looking at the network formed by replies and retweets in Twitter inside of a particular hashtag. Here, I'll go over the results of Museums and the Web 2009, a.k.a. #mw2009.

I just did a run on the first two days of the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference using the tools I've been working on (see my post on #swineflu earlier this week.) Using the hashtag #09ntc, I parsed 3834 tweets, and I looked up the hubs and authorities, plus generated the graph of the largest strongly connected component within the larger directed graph created from all the "@" replies and retweets.

Another fascinating day at DIMEA 2008. One of the keynotes, by the Greek artist Michalou(di)s, described sculpting using silica aerogel. It's an incredibly light insulator, but it also has a strange "immaterial" beauty to it, like looking into a cloud. Very cool. I also saw presentations on AI painting, biometric sensing art (right up my alley), and a very cool haptic device that rests on the nail of the finger, but makes the user feel like their touching something in the front.