Virtual Revolution pt2

Continuing on from yesterday, I will now talk about recommendation engines. People seem to have a somewhat Marmite relationship with these things but I can't really see how you can take such offence to something, can't you simply ignore it? My person experience is that on the whole they are helpful. Sometimes Amazon comes up with a few odd suggestions but usually they make sense i.e. a previous album by the same artist or another book in a series. I don't often use them when shopping and I find the Tesco software for highlighting cheaper products to be truly awful, most of the time it offers you a smaller packet of a more expensive brand so when you have found a bumper pack of something for the cheapest price per unit and it offers you a pack half the size with a much greater price per unit it is useless.

The most useful recommendation engine I have come across is Last.fm which is a recommendation engine at its core. Without it, I wouldn't have discovered 3/4 of my music library and it is my primary source for discovering new music. Most of the time it is pretty good at guessing / working out what sort of music I would be interested in. Because it has such a large user base, every time a song is scrobbled, the engine improves so with millions of scrobbles per day, no wonder it is pretty good. I have noticed that it tends to stick to the same set though as when I was listening the other day - for the first time in a while - I noticed that after I had stopped and resumed it, the same artists came back around again with the same songs. A little bit annoying that it couldn't ban those songs for the rest of the day perhaps so that I get a chance to listen to someone else's music. It also seemed a bit obsessed with the Dolly Rockers... are they set to be the next big thing? Perhaps but I have my eye on someone else at the moment and she may just make an appearance on my single of the week tomorrow.