I'm sitting in the kitchen here at Casa del Lamb, and we're bashing around some ideas for mashups and cool ways to display data for MooseCamp and Northern Voice. We just had (what I think is) a really cool idea. What if we could take the OPML file from the planet.northernvoice.ca aggregator (which contains a reference to many/most of the blogs representing the people attending the conference), and run some analysis on that to figure out what the relationships and subgroups are within the larger group of Northern Voice Attendees.
Ideally, it would be some kind of self-running and/or interactive application, capable of being left running on a projected screen in the foyer during the conference, updating (either live or periodically) to show how relationships change as people post items to their blogs, and possible add (or remove) links to each other's blogs.
This would become a form of social zeitgeist - possibly showing how the group dynamics change over the the course of the conference (and afterward).
I've done some preliminary poking around in the internets to find possible prior art, and am surprised that I haven't found anything. I'll keep looking, and then might try to hack something together. Unfortunately, I think this is primarily a graphic data representation problem, an area where I have essentially zero skill at cobbling code together for.
OK. Now to think about it some more, and finish up with the lasagna prep...