Backchannel
Eyes in the back of your head
“For a super cool representation of the channel as it’s happening, check out this backchannel visualizer by stamen. Good stuff.”
—Sean Bonner, Suicide Girls
Backchannel is a real-time view of the conversation happening in the #etech IRC channel at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference. We have a bot observing events in the channel, publishing them as a web-service via XML and JSON, and making them available to a visualization component built in Flash.
The conference backchannel is home to a lot of interesting conversational dynamics: additional context, participation from speakers, visitors from elsewhere in the world, sniping, and coordinated walkouts. We’re intrigued by the idea of a pointedly live visual environment that illustrates and responds to this other space.
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