A meme du jour is MusicPlasma, an incredibly fast and gracefully-designed site that maps the relationship between musical artists. I was blown away by how quickly and attractively it rendered its results.
It was intriguing to look at a couple of search results. The Cowboy Junkies were an isthmus, with Lisa Loeb and Sarah Mclachlan on one end and Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams on the other. Warren Zevon, on the other hand, was orbited by the likes of Lou Reed, Richard Thompson and (gulp) Little Feat.
This site no doubt uses Amazon’s API to render the relationships between artist nodes. The basis of those connections–the actual data sets used–isunclear.
One complaint: the colour of the node appears to only serve an aesthetic purpose. It’d be cool if it reflected something about the artist as well.
DarrenBarefoot.com 