Here is the latest in my continuing series on analyzing Twitter conference backchannels by their hashtags and replies/retweets. This one, though, is a bit different and special... because I was actually at the conference! Below is my breakdown of Games + Learning + Society 2009 via the #gls and #gls09 hashtags.

Because I've recently been... let's just come out and say obsessed with looking at the social relationships that seem to emerge from examining sociograms of Twitter users within the "channel" of a particular hashtag, here's another one I thought was interesting: Media in Transition 6, a.k.a. #mit6.

The subgraph of the largest strongly connected component for Media in Transition 6.

Just a quick post about another conference's Twitter backchannel I analyzed recently. Take a look at my posts on #swineflu and #09ntc to get a full picture of what I'm up to here. Basically, I'm looking at the network formed by replies and retweets in Twitter inside of a particular hashtag. Here, I'll go over the results of Museums and the Web 2009, a.k.a. #mw2009.

I just did a run on the first two days of the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference using the tools I've been working on (see my post on #swineflu earlier this week.) Using the hashtag #09ntc, I parsed 3834 tweets, and I looked up the hubs and authorities, plus generated the graph of the largest strongly connected component within the larger directed graph created from all the "@" replies and retweets.

The biggest set of tweeters where everyone is both replying and replied to in the 24-hour twitterfall ending at around 5 p.m. Eastern time on 4/26/2009.

The biggest set of tweeters where everyone is both replying and replied to in the 24-hour twitterfall ending at around 5 p.m. Eastern time on 4/26/2009.

I've been doing more research on Twitter recently, mostly looking at back channels from conferences (more on that to come). I wanted to post up a quick analysis, though, on a recent story that blew up big--the Swine Flu outbreak (found in twitter, in part, via the #swineflu hashtag.)

I had an interesting experience today watching the various media assembled, largely through twitter, of the protest in 65 5th Ave. While I don't have much to say one way or the other on the event itself, it was fascinating to see the raw news feed come together and to get a sense of the spread of and reaction to the news of a noteworthy event.

I just finished reading Nicholas Lemann's article "Conflict of Interest" in the latest New Yorker. It crystallized a lot of the thinking I've done in the past few years about politics, all the way back to when I was an organizer for Democracy for America here in Hudson County.

I couldn't call my participation in the DFA effort as anything more than a failure, but it taught me a lot about the push and pull of real politics. As it turns out, I don't have a taste for that kind of work--I think I'm temperamentally unsuited for it. But it did drop the scales from my eyes. I stopping seeing the act of governing as a battle between good and evil, and, rather, saw it as the net result of conflicting and cooperating interests.

The Lemann article sums it up well, and I'd encourage anyone with an interest in the subject (or the engine) to read it. For me, it helped to gel a number of key components that ought to factor into games like this:

• Players should either represent an interest and compete for the attention of policy makers and the general public (Bentley's organizational interests)
• OR players should represent a policy maker who is beholden to interests--or, rather, requires the backing of a number of interests, none of which need be permanent or essential. A game of political survival rather than idealism.
• The game will involve, at its core, the pushing and pulling of different levers on a system.
• BUT this is NOT the game, no more than resetting a series of timers is Diner Dash
• Therefore, a game mechanic is needed that creates a sense of expressiveness, in Bogost's terms.
• And a narrative that explains the affordances of the "lever pushing" in the same way that waiting tables explains the timers in Nick's game.

That's what I have for now. More questions than answers at this point, but it makes sense for me to start taking apart some of the work from this spring's "iPod Game" and working out a mechanic for that kind system and logical interface.