Defrag 2010

Thanks to a Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneur Scholarship and Market Visit support from UKTI, I had the great pleasure of attending Defrag 2010 in Colorado last month and the opportunity to savour the vibrant start-up ecosystem in Boulder.

Defrag is organized brilliantly by Eric and Kim Norlin, with a perfect blend of attention to the detail that matters and a confident and playful informalty that cultivates a sense of community and serendipity. The upshot is a stimulating gathering on a human-scale, in which you find yourself marvelling at scintillating speakers in one moment and engaged in an impromtu seminar with them in the next:

 

I took the opportunity to map parts of the conference live as well, with the map shown below. The result is more of a dynamic scrapbook than a comprehensive map (with the latter requiring several mappers to cover the parallel sessions and, ideally, collaborative curation from the conference commuity as well). However, the map gives a flavour of the way in which graphs of this kind can be used to connect and distill the conference community, ideas and conversation from one conference to the next.

The graph also includes the slides from the presentations that have been made available online to date.

I travelled to Defrag with high expecations: and those expecations were exceeded by far; so, if you have the chance to attend Defrag 2011, seize the moment…

…and, if you can’t wait to sample the fun: Blur and Glue beckon too.

Wordle up

Jonathan Feinberg has created Wordle a delightful tool for making and sharing beautiful word clouds (see the Debategraph illustration below).

Debategraph visualised in Wordle

Click here for the full size version.

As with other word and tag clouds, the frequency with which words appear in a submited text determines their scale in the cloud; however, Wordle builds on this by offering a range of formatting options and exploiting the space within words and letters to give a more organic feel to the resulting clouds.

Hat Tip: the ever inspiring Lloyd Shepherd.