In the conference’s opening plenary, Chris Csikentmihalyti presented his work with ExtrAct (video, project), which is building tools for people monitoring gas and oil extraction in their towns.  He showed a google earth video zooming into Western Colorado, and showing all the wells in the state of Colorado.  It was a crowd-gasping moment. (sorry, no linkage)

Chris then talked about community projects, and used OpenStreetMap.org as an example of a global data collection effort. Another spinny globe video showed the additions of street segments to the OpenStreetMap.org database over the 2008 calendar year.  Impressive, to say the least.

The next speaker was Ben Fry, one of the inventors of Processing.  He gave a good introduction to Data Visualization, why it’s relevant, and how a successful visualization communicates a great deal of information in a small amount of space.  Among the demos in Ben’s talk, one of them was one of the earlier processing visualizations, zipdecode. (try clicking on the map and typing ’02138′)  My first thought was “Awesome, more maps!”  He followed it up later with live demo of Cascade on Wheels’ Wall Map (project, video).  Again, my reaction: “Awesome, more maps!”

These two speakers stood out to me, because of their use of spatial data in their presentations.  Neither of them said anything about GIS, geography, spatial data, or anything of that nature, they just threw the interactive maps on the projector in the auditorium, and let the maps tell the story.  It flowed into the rest of the presentation, and made sense.  It was excellent to see another perspective and use of geography and geographic data, even if nobody mentioned it, or called it out.  The data was just naturally spatial, and the visualizations were so easy to understand, there was no need to explain it.

If this is the future of news, I’m tuning in.