To see them in the context of the conference programme, I converted the tweets and the event schedule to XML suitable for display in a Simile Timeline. Click the screenshot below to access the resulting timeline mashup (nb tweets take a few seconds to load).

What would have made this exercise easier, and the conference tweets easier to track:

• If the conference programme had been published in a more mashable format eg iCal / XML
• If there was a way to identify a particular conference track (a sub hashtag? – or is that overkill?)
• A way to distinguish critical comments, reportage, and general flim-flam. Though perhaps that is part of the fun!

The graphic below shows the Bristolian IDs with the most friends who are also located in Bristol. The most highly connected accounts are in red towards the centre. The highest number of Bristolian friends was 183 (bristolnews), with the average number 11, though stats like this of course ignore the fact that many people don’t report their location (or do report it as lat/long). An initial look shows that “traditional” media corporate – and individual – IDs are well linked in, but that social and creative orgs. and those backed by online community sites are also among the most popular.

When I get time, the plan is to categorise IDs by sector and by individual / corporate (though there is a large number of in-betweens). There are also signs that the accounts are organised into four distinct clusters and it will be interesting to see if there is any discernible basis to this.

Here is a Wordle of the user bios. Not too many surprises here – a good overview of Bristol’s online creative community – though the prominence of tea was interesting (23 mentions) in comparison to coffee (8) !