Playing with Last.fm tags

Anthony Liekens has put together a few web tools that do fun things with Last.fm tags. One tool is Compare User Tag Clouds. This tool takes two last.fm users calculates a tag cloud for each individual based upon their listening habits, and then shows the overlap between the two clouds - that represents the overlap in music preferences. This cloud is a good representation of your common music tastes. I especially like the difference cloud the tool shows that highlights the difference in music preference. Here's the difference cloud between my listening (in green) and Steve's listening (in red).

liekens-diff.png

It is easy to see from this cloud the kind of music that Steve likes that I don't. Also, can you guess what country Steve is from?

Some of been proclaiming that 2008 is the year that the Tag Cloud dies - that this Web 2.0 icon has run its course and will disappear from the web. Certainly there are many sites that have added social tags to their site in such a poor manner that they should be eliminated. We've already seen a few sites such as QLoud, de-emphasize or eliminate tags all together. But I don't think this is the end of social tags - it is just the weeding out of all of the bad implementations of tagging. I think this year we will start to see more innovative ways to use tags to help people organize, explore and discover new content.

Btw, Elias (from Last.fm) and I are giving a tutorial on social tags and music - so if you are interested in social tags and music you might want to check it out.

Posted on: Aug 17, 2008

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

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See also:

http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/wordspectrum/index.html

But comparing two users, rather than two concepts, is very much in line with the sort of (explicitly) collaborative exploratory search that I'm into. Get me away from the mass cloud of anonymous user data. Let me create views of the data that are directly related to one, maybe two, other specific people. People that I know, want to work with, want to play with, share some sort of information need with. That's the sort of collaboration that's really interesting!

Posted by jeremy on August 21, 2008 at 07:44 PM EDT #

That's a pretty nice looking tag cloud, just in terms of the typesetting and layout. Not only are other tag clouds less useful, they're also less attractive.

Posted by mim on August 22, 2008 at 12:21 PM EDT #

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