Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading quite a lot about the role of social networks as a key influence in voting patterns. Not surprisingly, people have begun to work out that recommendations and collaborative filters mean something for the ballot box as well.
It is in this context that I began to think of strange mashups. If I had a map of, say, the music people listened to, a geographical breakdown of musical taste, and then I overlaid it with a map of voting patterns, what would it look like? Would I find that red and blue voters in the US had the same disparity in musical taste as in everything else? Or was the disparity a lie, a facade?
Ironic then that I should find the following Gracenote maps while in this mood, thanks to Mark O’Neill, a Facebook friend and fellow IT professional. Gracenote has gone to the trouble of mapping musical taste for a reasonable slice of the world, with some unusual outcomes. For one thing, I learnt how out of touch I was; I didn’t even recognise the names of some of the Top 10 in “developed world” countries. Only goes to show.