[Chicago] NoonHat

[skip at pobox.com]

One of the lightning talks I liked best was Brian Dorsey's presentation
about NoonHat:

    http://www.noonhat.com/lunch/
    http://youtube.com/watch?v=2f4c1dQW3vY

The key observation which led Brian to develop it was that people are rarely
exposed to differing points of view.  They pretty much hang with people they
agree with.  He put up a graph (of the nodes and arcs type) which showed the
"also bought" association of a set of books related to the 2004 presidential
election.  Not too surprisingly, there were lots of connections between
books of one political stripe, but very few between books with dissimilar
viewpoints.

The result was NoonHat.com (Django+Python+database+Google mash-up).  I
signed up for lunch at the conference, but got no matches.  I also signed up
for a Loop lunch on Thursday.  That didn't pan out either.  Still, I think
it's a great idea, so I'm spreading the word.  Check it out, see if you
agree.  If so, sign up for lunch.  Pass it around.

Cheers,

-- 
Skip Montanaro - skip at pobox.com - http://www.webfast.com/~skip/