Did a panelist just say bestiality?

So, the panel I moderated at SXSW went exceedingly well. That’s what happens when you stack the deck with smart, witty, quotable peeps. I was honored to be up there with them.

We projected the #sxswbeast feed for the audience in real time to get a sense of the mood and questions. In lieu of the podcast of the talk (which has not yet been posted) you can thumb through the feed and get a pretty damn good idea of the meat of the talk. The Hive Mind as Cliffs Notes.

Here’s a Wordle cloud of all the tweets that came in. Click for larger. (Find the suppository!)

In another vein is this visualization from Social Collider. It shows lateral connections between Twitter conversations. The vortex at the middle represents all the different audience conversations happening during the talk. But the interesting bits are the lines that shoot out to the left and right, like the rings of Saturn. These represent similarities to other tweets taking place at the same time. Most are from SXSW itself so the graph is, in a way, a snapshot of thematic resonance at the conference between sessions. The more horizontal the line, the more simultaneous the discussion.

Here’s the visualization. Click for larger.

Slightly humorous is that one of the tweets was about the book Orbiting the Giant Hairball — a classic on the topic of corporate entrepreneurship. Hairball indeed!