As we're in the final stages of rebranding/getting our brand-spanking-new website up and running at work, I wasn't able to attend this year's Arts Marketing Association conference, despite being down for it.

However, Thanks to the prolific tweeting of those who were there, plus live streams provided by Envirodigital, I still got a very good idea of what happened - from the initial technical problems courtesy of Skype, to the humour and excitement of the closing keynote; from the wisdom being passed down, to the debacle over the is-it-or-isn't-it-vegetarian chocolate pudding.

In order to get an even better idea of the key points made, I souped up a bit of code I'd written at the behest of Jack from Mind Unit, which 'scrapes' tweets from Twitter's search function and presents them in a nice table, and ran it on the #amaconf hashtag.

What resulted was a dataset with over 2,100 rows, containing every tweet made on Wednesday and Thursday of the conference. From this, I cut it back to just tweets made from 10am to 5:30pm, when the main conference sessions took place - which had the added benefit of trashing most of the tweets about partying and drunken frolics, which might have proven embarassing to the tweeters (and, more importantly, just made me more jealous that I hadn't been there).

I then performed a spot of "manual filtering" as I read the tweets, to remove any about the air conditioning (apparently it was quite cold), lunch (good, but not enough of it) and other things that didn't fit. What remains is 589 mainly interesting, sometimes insightful tweets that give a good overall flavour of the conference. It's like being there (if you really, really use your imagination).

Sooo... You can view or download the heavily-sanitised and anonymised spreadsheet of tweets here.

Please note that the times in the spreadsheet are very approximate; they're rounded to the nearest hour (by Twitter) so I altered them slightly to keep them in the right order. They should still correspond roughly to the conference timetable, though.

I'd be interested if anyone did anything useful or meaningful with the data - drop me a line if you do. And hopefully I'll make it to next year's conference in sunny Brighton in person!

(By the way, my favourite tweet? "This is the arts; cake is currency!" So true.)