Scrobbling

"Audioscrobbling" is a music recommendation system used by Last.fm. The definition from Audioscrobbler is:

The Audioscrobbler system is a massive database that tracks listening habits and calculates relationships and recommendations based on the music people listen to

Basically, Last.fm tracks the music you listen to, and compares it to what everyone else is listening to, to find connections between what you listen to and the music that others who listen to the same things are listening to. Then it suggests related or similar music you might like. Often the suggestions are obvious. If you are listening to Bach, for instance, it will probably recommend Mozart, Handel, Brahms, and other classical music authors.

There is a downloadable plugin which will track what you listen to, or you can create playlists on Last.fm and play them from the site. While the tracking and suggestion part is rather nice, the best part is being able to create playlists to listen to when you are at a computer that doesn't have your music on it (*cough* public computers *cough*).

Other uses? It also lists "popularity" of artists, showing how many people have "scrobbled" them. I'm not sure how useful the "similar artists" part is, but it's an interesting way to browse through music you may not otherwise find. Not all artists have music, and not all have full tracks available. In fact, it seems like most of the music is just 30 second samples. But there's enough to make it a good time sink. :)

I wonder if something like this could be done with OPAC data? I guess that would be like the Amazon feature "People that bought also bought ..." Maybe it could say something like "people who liked this also tried ...." or "also looked at..." or "also liked..." Of course, to make it more scrobbler-like, it could say something like "people who loved this also loved ...."

Which brings up another possibility: Book ranking. You "tag" a movie, CD, book, or whatever, that you like, with a heart symbol. Patrons would see aggregated data in the form of hearts (bigger heart means more people "loved" it).

Just sayin'. But not holding my breath for it to happen (at least not here).