Today @bahne tweeted a message, shouting a big ‘thank you’ for sharing the detailed LeWeb’09 participant list. The list includes names, countries, companies for most of the participants. Looking at this long table with 1550 (updated Dec 04, 2009: 2055) entries I was thrilled by the large number of companies and countries. But hey, this is just a table without emotion. That’s why I’ve created a visual each of the participants companies and countries. My incentive was to create the visuals using only free software tools.

Step 1: It was neccessary to reprocess the table data. I did this using Open Office to create a new spreadsheet and checked wrong entries using Google Search and free people search services.

Step 2: I exctracted a list of company names and created a wordle word cloud, using the free Wordle service. I adjusted the colors and selected a template, which really easy with wordle. The following image was created my LeWeb’09 Companies visual, also available on flickr:
Version 1.1 updated Dec 06, 2009

Step 2b: Then I started to reformat, check and count the countries. The following list is created with Open Office and shared with you using Google Docs document sharing. LeWeb’09 participants by countries (public list):
Version 1.1 updated Dec 06, 2009

Step 3: Participants countries visualisation. I did some research for free online tools to create a piechart from the list. There are a few services online (read this mashable post), but watching the results I realized that I need another way to visualize the countries. Speaking from countries – what about a world map? The result of my search is the following map, made with Google Geomap service. It’s really easy, only a few lines of HTML code and the map was finished. Thanks Google!
Version 1.1 updated Dec 06, 2009

If you want to embedd this map on your blog or website, simply post this snipped in HTML mode. To adjust the width change the number 775 to a width that fits with your blog/website:

<iframe width="775" height="600" frameborder="0" src="http://birgerking.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/geomap_leweb09.html" style="border:1px solid #cccccc; overflow:visible; overflow-y:hidden; padding:0; margin:0;"></iframe>