Friday, June 28, 2013

GoodReads is *Weird*

Witness:


Based on my "Alabama" shelf, it is recommending I read Understanding Power, by Noam Chomsky; Killing Hope, a history of CIA operations; a history of the Russian Revolution; a work detailing how human rights have been destroyed in the rise of corporate power; and a history of anarchism.

Because each of these things reminds me so much of Alabama.  On another page, it is insisting I check out an anthology of wisdom literature based on my Transportation and Urbanism shelves.

3 comments:

  1. lol.

    I wonder who wrote that bit of heuristic software!

    My Amazon recommendations seem quite mundane compared to that..... [grin]

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  2. That is so bizarre. My Goodreads recs are not that strange and often accurate.

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  3. I *think* I figured it out: my Alabama shelf contains six books so far, one of which is "The Zinn Reader", the material of which is right in line with what Goodreads is urging me to read here. It's only one of six, though, so I don't know why it's having such a disproportionate say in my recommendations.

    http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7240015-stephen?shelf=alabama

    (I am currently bringing my GoodReads and Shelfari accounts up to date by adding labels to everything.)

    ReplyDelete

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