A friend sent me this article about the new Google offices in Canada. At first sight, it seems like another advertising article about Google. However, a second look you’ll show you that there’s something under the hood :)

The office was so damn well planned  that it’s awesome! Everything is thought to be part of an ecosystem – there are no leaks or missing parts.

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?

Interested in publishing your ESRI Shapefiles to Google Earth? Or converting KML files to SHP files? I found this nice freeware tool called KML2SHP which solves your problem. Free download here:

http://www.zonums.com/kml2shp.html