Just a few interesting tid bits from the last few sessions and stuff:

When Rael asked the audience how many of them had contributed to Wikipedia about 1/4 of the crowd raised their hands. Later when ask many used flickr it was about 90% and del.icio.us was about 50%. Also, Wikipedia has 499,388 articles in english as of this morning, 1.5 million across 200 languages. According to Alexa they are more popular than USA Today, PayPal, Excite, GeoCities and pretty much a dead tie with NY Times. At best guess the site is getting 500 Million pages views monthly but they really don't stop to count, they just keep adding servers so they don't know for sure.

Early on there was an IRC discussion about how utterly useless the bags are that you get handed when signing in at these kinds of conferences. Trevor on #etech said it's almost like the people at the registration desk are saying "Here, throw this away for me." I kept one single sticker from the bag I received at SXSW for example. The truth is that 99% of the stuff in that bag, if not the entire thing is in the trash 28 seconds after it's picked up.

Here's a cool zoomable graph showing how tagging has picked up.

Using Rendezvous it's easy to see when a session ends as the list of users drops from over 50 to less than 10 in a few seconds. Down in the lobby the effect of seeing all those names disappear was described (by Merlin) to be much like a huge disturbance in the force, like millions of voices crying out at once and them suddenly being silenced. This of course lead to much Star Wars talk and I got to show off the trailer for Episode III which I have on my Treo650. If you want to see it, find me in person and ask.

Feeling sick? Blame Andy. He's patient zero and the one to blame for all the coughing in the sessions.

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