Graphic Representation of Musical Genres

I've been thinking about data visualization and their relationships to organizational hierarchies and categorization for a few weeks now. Suddenly this rolls through my inbox:
http://www.musicplasma.com/

Type in an artist or band, and you'll get back an incredibly cool visual representation of relationships & similarities to other artists and bands. From there, you can zoom in and out of and move around in the cluster. Clicking one of the related artists will pop you into a new grouping. What a great way to discover new music based on what you know you like. They've got some pretty obscure stuff in there, too. It wasn't too easy to stump it other, at least with pop and rock. Classical got it all confused.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any description of how it works. The inter-relationships, based on genre and also time period, could be being pulled from some neat underlying RDF, but that doesn't explain how they track popularity and "representative of a musical style". I love the visual element, but (sadly) would also love a peek at the underlying data structures.

The design's super slick. I like the way you can change the style of various elements. I'm a bit taken aback that Neil Young's bubble is about twice the diameter of Dylan's, though!

Thanks for the link Betsy!

"Digital Futures" on C-Span

A new lecture series on C-Span with the Library of Congress starts tonight at 6:30 Eastern. It'll be on every few weeks until late March. Starts tonight with David Weinberger talking about blogs. Then Brewster Kahle on December 13th.

According to the C-Span web site, "The series will examine how the digital age is changing the most basic ways information is organized and classified." Should be pretty interesting.

Another Travel Blog

Most of you came here and started reading because this was billed as a travel blog. Then it went all exceedingly lame, and devoid of interesting travel tales. I promise, I'll be regaling you with more travel tales soon enough. But in the meantime, I seem to have spawned a trend in my family. My parents are currently in the midst of a 10 day trip to Hawaii. They're blogging, and posting photos (through hello instead of flicker) while they're there. My Dad's a much better photographer than I am, and my Mother, if she gets around to posting anything herself, writes much more elegantly than I do.

If my concert reviews, links to random stuff that I find entertaining, random thoughts and (forthcoming) techie nonsense is inspiring naught but ennui, please pay them a visit.

Election Day

Like most of the nation, and probably much of the world, my eyes will be glued to the television for the next 4-6 hours. I don't really expect anything to be decided at the end of the night, but that won't stop me from watching.

Many of you probably know that I have some pretty strong opinions regarding the choice we, as a nation, are making today. That said, I'm going to refrain from being too political here. I won't be imposing either a gloating post or an angry rant tomorrow morning, in large part as a courtesy to readers with viewpoints that don't align perfectly with mine. Frankly, I have no desire to contribute anything (no matter how inconsequential my writings may be) to the divisiveness that seems pretty much universal tonight. I consider this to be incredibly contrary to the spirit of compromise, co-operation and unity that is so desperately needed to resolve the geo-political, social and economic issues we're currently facing.

I will say that the most important thing is that voter turnout is high, voting is encouraged rather than discouraged and we are given (and take advantage of) the opportunity to make a choice tonight.

As an aside (and probably a divisive one, despite what I just said), I've something to say about Eminem. I've always been entertained by the guy, but in the same vein that I'm entertained by the Three Stooges, Clint Eastwood's Spaghetti Westerns, and the whole series of Die Hard movies. These are things that have nothing to contribute to intelligent dialog, but tend to be really entertaining, either due to hilarity or some connection to primal instinct.

However, Eminem moved himself into the category of South Park by saying something important. Eminem has influence over a demographic that typically does not vote and he's attempted convince them of the importance of this particular election. I can respect that. Mosh was not supposed to be the first single off his new album, but he's released a video online. There's an excellent article about the Mosh video on Slate. It includes a link through to the video itself. Definitely worth checking out.