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The U.S. Senate's legislation is the result of ever-shifting alliances. Using data from Govtrack you can get every Senator since John Adams. You also get their roll call votes. By summing the amount of times Senators voted together and dividing it by the number of sessions in a given year, Andrew Odewahn was able to calculate Senatorial affinities. He then plugged the affinities into GraphViz to visualize each year's social network.

These graphs reveal a lot about the state of bipartisanship at the time. For example in 1991 there was some cross-party voting. However, by the time 1994 rolled around with the "Republican Revolution" there was almost no cross-party voting. During the Clinton impeachment, the Democrats show a distinct rift, while the Republicans are solid (with the notable exceptions of future party-switchers Jeffords and Specter). This excellent talk reveals some of the secrets hidden in public data.

Andrew Odewahn works for O'Reilly in Cambridge. You can read more about his Senate graph research on our Broadcast blog. This talk was filmed at Ignite Boston. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Andrew Hyde runs Ignite Boulder. In this week's episode he shares his thoughts at Ignite ATL about the rapid economic shifts that can be caused by user-generated content. Andrew calls this The Posting Economy.

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If you want to be successful with your customers, you need to make them feel succesful. It's all about them achieving awesome. This week, Kathy Sierra explains some of the secrets for creating passionate customers. This is an area that Kathy knows well. She has classes on the topic around the world and her writings have been read by many.

Kathy is the co-creator O'Reilly's Head First series and, as you'll learn in her talk, she loves horses.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. It was filmed at Google I/O 2009 at the Moscone Center.

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Ignite is often used for geek ideas and how-to's but it can also be used for stories. Writer-director Scotto Moore shares his digital fairy tale from Ignite Seattle. Not wanting to reveal too much about his sci-fi story, Scotto describes CPU as "a cautionary tale about the dangers of modern neural malware."

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It's one of those things you usually don't think about: what will happen to my body when I die? Stacy Holmstedt has always been interested in the subject and in this talk she presents us with a very matter-of-fact answer to that question. She dives into the governmental and procedural consequences, while also explaining what's happening in the body at the same time.

Where does her knowledge come from? It comes from her childhood:

A few people asked me how I got interested in the topic of the body after death. My mom worked in the mortuary industry and we had a lot of dinner conversations about it. Usually while eating chicken. It was perfectly normal to talk about just how gory you had to be to warrant a closed-casket funeral (answer: extremely).

At any given time, our house contained hundreds of dollars worth of funeral flowers. Someone had to take them or they were going to the landfill.

This talk was filmed at Ignite Phoenix (who are working with a local high school to have an Ignite!). It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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The future of gadgets isn't necessarily the homogeneous iPhone. With open source hardware and personal manufacturing, we can all have custom gadgets someday. At Ignite Toronto Mark Argo talks about what we can learn from history as we try to make a DIY future. He describes the talk as:

Since the dawn of humanity we have fashioned objects to help extend our basic capabilities: see better, walk farther, speak louder, soar higher. More than ever we depend on these 'gadgets' to navigate our environment and culture. 'Adapting With Technology' explores the origins of modern gadgetry and looks towards their future role as personal technologies.

And here's some more about Mark:

Mark is an artist and technologist who has worked extensively in creative applications of software, hardware and networks. His work has been exhibited internationally across Asia, Europe and North America, and has been featured in major technology magazines such as Wired and Linux Journal. Mark was a resident artist at the Fabrica Communication Research Center in Treviso, Italy for 2005-2006, recipient of the MobileAsia competition's grand prize in 2006, and is supported by the Canadian Arts Council to develop a series of new works for 2009-2010. Currently he is an instructor at Ryerson's New Media program and founder of Aesthetec Studio (aesthetec.net)

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Visualizations can be used to make sense of massive amounts of data. As Matthias Shapiro says visualizations turn information into understanding. Designers use color, size, location, time, and networks to convey a message.

Matthias Shapiro shares his visualizations at Designer WPF and Veracity. Here are some links to visualizations from his talk:

Slide 11 (Color Visualization Example): Map of the Market – stock market visualization

Slide 13 (Location Visualization Example): Map of flights in the US in a 24 hour period. This actually uses color to indicate altitude (darker is higher, lighter is lower, but I didn't have time to go into that in my talk.

Slide 15 (Network Visualization Example): My Facebook friends as graphed by Nexus Graphs

You can find the rest of the links on his blog. This talk was filmed at Ignite SLC.

The Ignite Show will feature a different speaker every Tuesday for free. It's available on YouTube (user: Ignite), on our Ignite site and via iTunes. It is being released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The format of Ignite is 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds. When you are on stage giving an Ignite talk this can be quite exhilarating (sometimes terrifying). The added adrenalin really adds to the presentation and I think that will come through on the small screen.