A SXSW panel proposal - The Wisdom of Thieves: Meaning in P2P Behavior

So I've submitted a proposal for SXSW interactive 2012 entitled "The Wisdom of Thieves: Meaning in P2P Behavior". If you're the sort of person that might be interested in that sort of thing you can comment and/or vote on it over here. The talk will basically be a tour of all the fun and exciting ways you can use BitTorrent data to make better (mostly music, but also TV, film, and app-store type things) applications, with data sources like this. Here's the abstract and questions:

The act of piracy is typically viewed as devaluing content - the track that wasn’t streamed, the video game that wasn’t purchased. However, peer-to-peer networks of piracy are rich descriptions of fans who are interested enough to find content. By observing these descriptions, artists can better understand their fan base; recommendation and discovery can be better tuned. In this talk we’ll explore the similarities between BitTorrent downloads and a number of other means of online interaction, such as likes, mentions, and scrobbles. We’ll show how interactions vary between popular artists and works versus those found in the long tail, whether they’re emerging artists or niche films. Our audience will leave with a utility belt of tools to leverage data about and around peer-to-peer sharing of music and video. This talk will use data available via the Semetric API and open source Python scripts, freely available for download prior to the talk.

Questions Answered:

1. How is peer-to-peer activity different from communities on Facebook, Twitter or Spotify?
2. Can you use location data and a torrent network to optimize a tour schedule?
3. Which countries should I syndicate my TV show in?
4. How can you use co-occurrence in piracy to recommend content?
5. Why should I consider the behavior of roving bands of thieves?

Also, my colleagues have panel proposals for SXSW music and film as well, go check them out here and here.