Chris Heuer's Insytes

I was thinking about the political map of the US and the whole Red vs. Blue thing just now. What would it look like if it were colored based on musical interests. In particular, I was thinking about who listens to more heady acid jazz like Groove Salad radio and who listens to poppy mainstream and who listens to country music. I think we could all find some interesting insytes and understandings from such an information tool when correlated with other data points (like overlaying the musical interests against a red/blue map or perhaps a blogger feedmap).

We would need some sort of music sales data coupled with Zip codes overlaid onto Google Maps – but I think the results would give us something pretty interesting – probably already a commercial version of this in some record industry office somewhere being used for a different purpose already. If we could find the data source and get it built somehow it would be pretty cool. I would suggest a UI that enabled people to create their own sorts of comparisons based on different data sources and displayed vis-a-vis zip code based maps. People could then write insytes and commentary on the results. When people entered combinations that had previously been entered, they would see other people’s entries and be able to comment on them as well as create their own new insytes. Certainly valuable for a multitude of business purposes as well as for creating a broader sense of understanding.

Anyway, just the seed of an idea at the moment as I am thinking about new forms of community forming social media tools. I am going to start blogging about more potential social media models over the next couple of weeks since they just keep coming and I don’t have time to pursue them all. Maybe someone else does…

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