Article from Network World newsweekly

October 16, 1995, page 35.
Circulation: 160,000


SIMILARITIES? I HEARD IT ON THE GRAPEVINE

A friend of mine, Pauline Borsook, just sent me a note about a "way kool" service on the Internet.

The service's owner, David Whiteis, sent her a note urging her to try it out, with hopes that he might get mentioned in Wired--for which Borsook has been known to pen a peice or two.

So, David, perhaps to your surprise, here you are in Network World. Perhaps it's not quite the cachet of Wired. (We don't print in vermilion italics with goldleaf drop caps on a scarlet page.) But at least in this publication, you can figure out where the articles begin and end. But I digress.

Before I get around to David's service, I should point out that this sequence--David telling Paulina, Paulina telling me, me telling you, you telling someone else--is a much underrated attribute of the 'Net.

This is because that apart from being the eighth wonder of the world, the Internet is the biggest grapevine ever. This column, for intance, is a great example of how the 'Net works in spreading a message.

It just goes to show that advertisers and PR folks have a lot to learn about the dynamics of on-line promotions--the least of which is that if you can identify and inform enough people who are really interested in what you have to say, those people will handle mass advertising for you.

Now, back to David. What he's offering is a service on the Web called The Similarities Engine. This will take a list of your favorite musicians and their albums, and send you, via E-mail, a list of recordings that might be of interest to you. So far, David tells me that 10,000 people have tried it.

I sent my mainly jazz list: two Art Porter (my hero) CDs, Boney James, Brecker Brothers and B-Tribe. I got back a list that looks pretty interesting. (David tells me the system struggled with my tastes; most of the lists submitted are in the Nirvana, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Pink Floyd vein.)

My list of suggestions contains a lot of artists I know of and a few I don't recognize. This is good because the ones I know begin to validate that David's system apparently understands my tastes.

The downside is that the ones I don't know look interesting. Now I have to go and buy all these albums to see how good that understanding really is. Perhaps I can expense it as research?

So how does David's system work? Well, he's not saying.

But here at the Gibbs Institute of Reverse Engineering and Wild Hypotheses, we've come up with two ideas.

At the high end of guessing is that he's digitized countless CDs, fed the data through a massive neural network that analyzed them for rhythm, structure and dynamics, and built a gigantic cross-reference table to produce the results. At the low end, he gets your query and calls up a dozen audiophile friends and, voila, intant list. We favor the latter.

You might want to try it out at http://www.webcom.com/se/


Gibbs craves your indulgence. Tell him what's up at mgibbs@gibbs.com, or call him at (800) 622-110-8, Ext. 504.



Thanks, Mark Gibbs!