Word Clouds for BSides SF and the RSA Conference

Word clouds are a great way to visualize text, especially on platforms like Twitter where a great amount of people can be talking about one subject. I recently spent the last 6 days at two San Francisco information security conferences: BSides San Francisco and RSA.

BSides this year was February 28–29 and RSA was February 29-March 4. There’s some overlap in attendees, but the talks and the feeling you get from being at the cons couldn’t be more different. BSides is community driven and the talks are mostly by security practitioners; RSA has a trade-show feel and most talks are conducted by people that work for security vendors.

I was curious about what words showed up most in tweets with the hashtags #BSidesSF and #RSAC and see how different or alike they were. I used the twitteR and wordcloud packages in R to generate these images.

Here’s #BsidesSF:

and here’s #RSAC:

People were definitely tweeting about different things; BSides attendees generally had more positive language and tweeted about presenters. RSA attendees tweeted about keynote speakers (like Sean Penn) and contained a lot of retweets mentions. I am also not surprised the word “booth” was a top keyword in #RSAC, from vendors tweeting out “Come to our booth and get a free pen!”

It was interesting to see the similarities and differences. Let me know what you think.