Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

...at the Worldcon, we came across a radio theatre adaptation of Star Wars, and now I've been pointed to a Humphrey Bogart version of Lord Of The Rings...

A while back I pointed out one of the first Amazon web services applications, a set of tools that allowed you to generate and explore similarities between books on a map. However, it was a static application, you couldn't explore the map and find new connections. While finishing up the screenshots for this month's XML column I found that someone's taking the mapping model and gone a whole stage further...

What they've ended up producing is a Java application that takes an initial search term (in books, music or DVDs), generates a similarities map, and then makes it clickable. Click once on the letter 'H' to get a description of the item, click twice on the item bubble to generate similarities for this item. It's all done in a clean, fast, well designed UI. You can scale the display, and drag results around the screen in a dynamic, elastic environment, which gives this completely abstract application a certain physicality.

This is is exactly the sort of thing that web services should be used for at this stage of their development - inspirational tools that show a whole new way of working with existing data sets.

Well worth an exploration. Or three. You can wander around whole geographies of ideas, without leaving your browser.

Chill out over iTunes while in the office with a good quality low bandwidth feed (only 32Kbps) from Astreaux World. It's pretty much non-stop Tangerine Dream-style ambient electronica.