Data Redwood Forest

Wednesday May 25th 2011 – Data Redwood Forest

Paige and I caught up with Joshua Kauffman, Ben Cerveny and crew at a going away party for Karen at the Royal Peacock. Ben Ceverny and crew made a pretty music browsing app that uses a planetary metaphor. It’s simple but has a lot of potential, and it reminds me of an older aspiration of mine to render all of my journals, projects and ideas as a redwood forest. In such a project I would conceptually map each project to a tree where the tree size, foliage and the like could represent different aspects of the data. Then I could wander through a forest visualization of my data. It’s the kind of project that is fun but requires a bit of dedication and time that I don’t have right now. I did look into procedurally generating trees and I saw that it wasn’t that hard to achieve but it’s just lower on my priorities.

It also struck me that if Ben could give people a sense of the size of the musical universe that they’d be able to then kind of see where their tastes fit, what parts of the universe they had not yet explored.

Normally I don’t talk about money but it could be self supporting if you just linked it to an Amazon affiliates code. Recently I connected my last.fm to twitter via a little third party agent and I notice they twitter a link with their affiliate code – which obviously is how they pay for their service – clever and cute.