One of the more interesting conversations I had at SxSW was the with Nick Ducoff of Austin-based Infochimps. Those of you interested in the trends in big data are likely well aware the company – they’re in the business of curating, housing and providing API access to large data sets, and at the festival, they announced the launch of over 2000 new data sets, an amazing feat in and of itself.

Additionally, they announced the debut of the API explorer, a vehicle for getting an immediate understanding sans-documentation of how each API functions.

The datasets aren’t particularly obscure, either. Nick showed me a number of the staff favorites from the new debut, including a database of all MLB statistics, which contains “a record of major league games played from 1871-2008.”

On the social data side of things, they also play host to the Qwerly API, which allows, in essence, a “whois” for Twitter. A simple query to the Qwerly API returns profile URLs and some extended information across everything that Qwerly is able to find.

Curation and Mashups were the Theme of the Conference

I’ve been asked repeatedly by those who didn’t get to go to SxSW as to what I saw were vibes and themes of this show. I noticed a number of things, both of which Infochimps’ presence and announcement played right into: this is a distribution year, rather than an innovation year, and that curating (otherwise known as extracting signal from noise) played a major role.

Both themes have the same root cause, essentially: there is more data freely available floating around, and the only way to extract value from that data is to curate it, organize it, and cross-reference it with other data classifications.

Infochimps plays a crucial role in all of this. Infochimps isn’t in the business of creating structure of unstructured data. Rather, similar to Google, their core philosophy is to index the data (and unlike Google) curate, make available and clean up for developers the metadata around that data.

Nick also hinted, in addition to the existing announcements, at upcoming available data around location, which certainly plays into the zeitgeist of where current social development projects are. This clearly puts Infochimps in a place where they’ll easily be a go-to source of data as this world develops.