When I attended the Web Science Trust event at the Royal Society (pictured below) two weeks ago I came to learn that someone was monitoring the progress of the conference through a prototype twitter analytics platform called the Archivist.

While the Archivist didn’t provide a professional level tracking platform, yet, the founders, a group of developers who also facilitate conferences clearly developed a tool that allowed them to do just that, though not without some kinks (but what’s a tool without a few kinks or bugs?).  What the Archivist does best is track Twitter and let you know the activity of top authors as well as the top urls (though that part doesn’t work fully most of the time).

There appears to be a large number of re-tweets at the event (a good sign actually)

Potentially, the most valuable chart in the Archivist is the top Authors report (above) which simplifies a lot of the work of figuring out who are doing the most to spread the word at a conference or event associated with a hashtag.

I did a similar chart for #iwny (Internet Week New York – starting tomorrow) and got a similar chart; I know a few of the people behind the accounts but I find this visualization very useful, even if it’s just twitter and doesn’t capture every single tweet (as explained in the tool).

There are other tools to track conferences, and publish from them, but my focus in on analytics, not as much on live displays of what happens at the conference.  On the other hand, Pathable gives you a social network just for the conference itself (see Pathable: Social Software for Business Conferences ) though I didn’t see any specific analytics attached to Pathable (though it’s hard to imagine there aren’t any). And Twapper also keeps an archive (best if you set it up before the conference begins – people often make the mistake of waiting too long and then not being able to save the data.

And there’s also http://lanyrd.com/   Lanyrd  – which I looked at before I went to Davos, CH for On The Top last February.