Six Degrees of book similarities [more ideas]
The history of the idea of six degrees of separation has been written several times elsewhere (often incorrectly). For more information, works of Karinthy, Milgram, Barabási are good starters. Erdös numbers, the Oracle of Bacon, the wikipedia game, etc. have become more or less established parts of our popular culture. The idea of small worlds, scale free networks and the like have become so widely spread and (mis)understood that it could easily qualify as a promising candidate in the race for a general theory of everything.
To what else can we apply these ideas besides all the things they have been applied to already. After frequent use of Amazon's 'customers who bought this book also bought...' service, the following idea quickly presents itself:
- crawl, fetch and build a graph of all books sold on Amazon and similarities between them
- analyze graph with methods of graph theory
- create entertaining services, visualizations
- ... profit :)
An immediate application would be to have an 'Oracle of Bacon'-type service where links between any two books can be quickly found. How is Homer's Iliad related to Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming? Simple, those who bought the Iliad have also bought Plato's Republic, those who ....
Is the graph connected? If it is, what is its diameter, if not, what are the connected components. Which book is the most central? How does all this change if we limit ourselves to the few most important neighbors? It would be helpful to know more about what the links actually mean. Note that the items are not books in the everyday sense like 'Homer's Iliad' but products like 'The Iliad (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Paperback)'.
This could be an interesting tool for discovering new books, and it would be FUN. For profit make affiliate links to Amazon on all books.