I'm 'liveblogging' from MIT's Futures of Entertainment Conference - which is very exciting.
I've promised to write it up for Contagious and so am under self-imposed embargo - but I don't think it hurts to post a few cool things that I've seen here and there. Content appetisers, as opposed to snacks.
Marc Davis - social media guru at Yahoo! and all round smart chap - showed us Tagmaps - a kind of geo-folksonomy that overlays weighted tags onto places, and then pulls pictures from Flickr with those tags up alongside the map view.
This example application displays mostly geographical tags, but you can combine geo-tags with other data sets to show, for example, the most popular movies in different regions, events that have happened there, the distribution of bird species etc etc.
The size of the tag reflects its importance as measured by a kind of pagerank - number of tags plus strength of tags.
It's like a user generated map of the world, showing what's important to people where.
