Liveplasma - maps of connected artists

Liveplasma is an interesting site which uses data from Amazon to map connections between related artists (currently music or film). The site is still in beta, but the visual maps are easy to read and aesthetically pleasing.

Naturally, due to the fuzzy nature of the underlying data, strange results can easily occur, the same way you might sometime get strange recommendations on Amazon. Users can register in order to designate artists as “favorites”, but this doesn’t seem to offer much real functionality at the moment. It would be interesting if Liveplasma could use the users’ favorites as a complementary input to the Amazon data.

For those of you with good memories there was a non-commercial pioneer project online back in 1995 which also mapped similarities between artists. Unfortunately, the name of the project escapes me. It allowed users to register artists and albums and rate them. It would then try to match input from different users and suggest new artists that might be of interest. One can only imagine what that idea would have been worth if it had been properly dotcommed…