Last.fm is one of my favorite "attention data" use cases. After installing their plugin, your iTunes playlist metadata is shared with Last, which creates a set of charts that depict your listening habits, a list of recommended listens and reads, and a musical "neighborhood" filled with people who share your tastes.
One of the uses for attention data that I often discuss when describing AttentionTrust is getting connected with people who share your tastes via a system that can parse your mutually shared data, and that's precisely what your Last.fm neighborhood does.
Here are the 20 musical artists I've listened to most frequently as of Dec. 20th. (It's actually the top 21, just so I could include a reference to Haywood.)
And here are the top 20 overall artists for my closest Last.fm neighbor:
We share four artists in our top 20 (Jets to Brazil, Mission of Burma, Pavement and Paul Westerberg), and I know you'd find a lot more if you explored our charts further. So who's the guy with such good taste? My brother.
I mentioned Last to him over the summer, and he installed the plugin. I forgot he was using it until a few weeks ago, when I was checking out my Last neighborhood and saw him hanging out among my musical compadres. I didn't need Last to tell me that my brother and I like the same music, but I was surprised that our tastes were so similar. Attention data: bringing families together since 2005.
tags: attention attentiontrust last.fm
