Nuno Prospero dos Santos

LaLaClick is a web application to visualize and explore similarity relations of music artists. Warning: if you love music, you’ll get addicted to this site!

It works like this:

• The engine starts with the pre-loaded example: Radiohead. Music starts to play and some nodes appear on the screen.
• When no more nodes are added, you can simply select the option Clear All
• In the search band box, type the name of a band or singer and press the Enter key. Click on Add Aura. You can repeat the process over and over and produce a giant tree of alike artists.
• The nodes added, are bands somehow related to the name you typed! This way you can learn about bands similar to your taste :)

How does this work? Quite simple and interesting – the similarity is based on the principle that people who listen to this artist also listen to that one. The information about these “listening preferences” is powered by last.fm, a music community website which gathers about 20 million users.

A few days ago, I received an email with this website (thx Isabel), with the tag line: “The world as you’ve never seen it before”:

http://www.worldmapper.org/

This site has a huge database with maps, correlating several indicators, population density and countries dimensions. It reminded me a brilliant talk by Hans Roling on TED. It’s hard to understand the huge gap between the countries in many indicators. The question is: what can you do to change the situation?