If this is against board policy feel free to remove.
But I have found pandora.com to be HUGELY useful in finding more music i like, and in fact hace stopped listening to radio and just have a few stations of music on pandora. It all started with the Music Genome Project which picks out certain aspects of music and labels them and then puts them together with other types of like music.
My question is, Is there something like this for other mediums? Like books, or movies? plays? I’d love that, I need to find more books/movies that i would enjoy rather than just hearing about it from friends… they should make this for everything, like-minded-consumer products… Like this Shampoo? then try this dogfood! (random i know, but anyone have any examples or ideas?)
Amazon does a fairly decent job of this. You can rate stuff you buy and/or stuff you already own in all their categories.
Netflix does it too, for movies, but you have to sign up.
I’ve used the Amazon shpeal a few times, but I find it spits out the same 4-5 books for a topic and thats it. I feel the selection is limited i guess.
Criticker.com is the deal for movies. It also has a genome-type function for most of it’s movies rated. You rate and review a movie; It draws from your reviews and selects other users who have similiar views, then extrapolates from the movies they have seen and liked that you will also like them. This isn’t very accurate to begin with, as most people have a common core set of movies nearly everyone have seen (Usual Suspects, Lord of the Rings, Spiderman, X-Men, etc) but once you get down with your part their analysis begins to get more accurate.
One a x-period of time, you get a newsletter of what Criticker has chosen for your taste, based on the above technique, and I’ve never seen a movie from those newsletters that I haven’t liked or even loved. You can also just log on and check out what they recommend for you at any time, of course.
Another nifty item is the Compatible Users list: Say you’ve reviewed 150 movies. The database then picks out a list of other users who have reviewed the same or most of the same movies, and then you get a percentaged compatibility rate. As an example, a good friend of mine tops my list today: “Tjeiken has 89% compatible taste. Come check out what other movies he has liked!”
(Sorry for the poor explanation, it’s in the dead of night and I’m really tired. If I’m being unclear, I’ll try again tomorrow)
So yeah, go check it out! It’s pretty nifty and I’ve had a happy movie year of 2007 with this thing 