Clickables below:
http://hot-spot.me/sxsw.php<p>A couple days ago, I posted a mashup I did of the SxSW panelist directory. I found it a lot easier to pick panels based on what companies people came from. I got no love from YC:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281104<p>So let's try this again. This time, pick the pretty people, and if you make it through all the pages, I'll give you a list of the "prettiest" panels based on everyone's votes.<p>When I conceived of this, I wondered how evil it was. But after testing it a bit, I'm pretty confident in saying that pretty people propose great panels! I'm sure a larger discussion could be had on this topic. Maybe a panel next year? Anyone pretty want to propose it?<p>And in my defense, against claims I'm being objectifying and mean, I'm not showing anyone's ratings and I'm only showing the 20 most popular panels for each gender. If your panel was not picked, you were probably #21 and missed it by a hair.
OK, I've got to say this: I went through a few pages, so I saw ~100-150 people. It seemed to me that women's pictures tend to (i) show more of the body and (ii) how to say this, had a more "flirty" look.<p>Now, this is my <i>completely subjective</i> impression. However, it seems to me that the women in such technical conferences tend to send in more glamorous shots, to perhaps cater (subconsciously) to the highly skewed gender ratio. What do you think?<p>As an aside, I think if you want to get more love (from HN or anywhere else) don't emphasize the "pretty girl" angle because the label "girl" is felt to be demeaning by many people and after all in your site one can select both men and women, so why not say "attractive attendee"?<p>EDIT: Just thought of this: If you gather a lot of data, you can post results on how speaker/panelist attractiveness affects the number of people attending a session, corrected by the effect of the topic, of course. There are many organizers, I think, who would even <i>pay</i> for such information.
Quick suggestions for improvement, design-wise:<p>* Put the rows into a fixed-height container so that the size of the page doesn't keep jumping as the images load.<p>* After the second page or so, I found it too annoying to skim such a large list of images, so I just picked one and hit "next". Maybe only show a random subset of the pictures to every user to reduce overwhelmingness, or do it facemash/hotornot/cubeduel style and do 2 at a time.<p>* Bonus points if you can make all the images somewhat larger (maybe 50%) and the same sizes (by cropping with the face centered).<p>Overall, I applaud you for your effort. Unfortunately I can't imagine this having any longevity after the next week or two. Which doesn't necessarily make it a waste of time, some things are just worth doing for the sake of doing. :)
<i>When I conceived of this, I wondered how evil it was.</i><p>I have to admit, I felt pretty slimy going through this. I like a pretty face as much as the next person, but these people (I assume) didn't send in their picture expecting for it to be run through hotornot. Which brings me to the next point...<p><i>But after testing it a bit, I'm pretty confident in saying that pretty people propose great panels!</i><p>You're kinda hand-wavey here. What sort of data do you have to back this up? And what exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean that attendees have a more enjoyable time interacting with a more visually pleasing panel, or that attractive people are inherently better at running a panel?
Can I also say that I like how I don't tell people who in the panel helped them make the top 20 list?<p>For example, this is currently on the list of boys:
<a href="http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP8383" rel="nofollow">http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP8383</a><p>Will Pete and Dennis fight over who got more votes?<p>I will never tell.
I didn't see your first post, but I like this one. Your title was interesting, so I clicked through to the website. Once there I saw at least one pretty girl, so it was easy to get started and go through all the pages. You suckered me in!
Relatedly: Is X going... check if someone is going to sxsw
<a href="http://www.isxgoing.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.isxgoing.com/</a><p>Other cool SxSw data:
<a href="http://www.isxgoing.com/report" rel="nofollow">http://www.isxgoing.com/report</a>