MTV Music Awards 2010 - Visualisation

THe MTV Music Awards are one of the really big yearly music shows and as such a important date in the calendar. Of course this transfers to the social networking sites, with loads of followers chatting about it online.

For last years show Stamen has teamed up with MTV and Twitter to deliver a live visualisation of the conversations on twitter about the stars related to the show. The whole thing was based on word tags, counts to indicated how often each star was mentioned. These numbers feed into the visualisation showing an icon for each performer in the relative size of its online counter.


Image taken from fastcompany / screen shot of the live visualisation created by Stamen for the MTV Music Awards 2010.

This generates this bubble size chart layout, with the higher rated names moving into the centre. There is obviously some direct action going on between the fn camps of the individual stars and the online conversations reflect pretty much in real time the activity on screen. People are tweeting as they watch, mainly in front of the tv, presumably. As Stamen points out:"Midway through the video, Taylor Swift gets up on stage to receive her first Video Music Award—to have it promptly snatched from her grasp by Kanye West, who immediately blows up on Twitter."