Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Musical Cartography?

Browsing around today, I came accross an article from Discovery.

Basically, for those of you who didn't click through, there's a piece of software in development that analyses the music in a person's libary on a variety of traits, and then organizes it into a visual "map" of islands, based on these characteristics. Users could then navigate through their library based on these "islands" and hear music based on these criteria, rather than the usual playlist/album/etc. format. To sum it up, I'm picturing Pandora meets iTunes meets MS Flight Simulator.

Now, this is something I find interesting on its own, but also makes me think, what if instead of Pandora/iTunes meeting MSFS, what if it was something along the lines of Google Desktop Search (or Spotlight if you prefer) in this interface mash-up?

The data mined from these indexed search could be browsed visually. Or perhaps this is even a new way to view search results. Narrow down the field with a few keywords, and then your new Data Atlas takes shape, allowing you to (literally) come at a problem from a variety of directions.

For those interested in the various productivity methodologies, could this be a counterpart to the mind map? Not just an internal processing/brainstorming exercise, but finding a way to mine all your past data in new ways?

If anyone has any feedback, please, leave it in the comments!

Cheers,

Antemeridan

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