I heard about Gnod through a post on Slashdot from a story on discovering new music. You tell it some of your favorite bands (or favorite books, or favorite movies), it asks you some questions, and then recommends some new bands (or books, or whatever).
Gnod is a self-adapting system that learns about the outer world by asking its visitors what they like and what they don't like. In this instance of gnod all is about music. Gnod is kind of a search engine for music you don't know about. It will ask you what music you like and then think about what you might like too. When I set gnod online its database was completely empty. Now it contains thousands of bands and quite some knowledge about who likes what. […]
I entered a few obscure band names (well, highly successful in the metal scene, but not something you’d ever hear on the radio), and its picks were surprisingly accurate (it picked Iced Earth, Dark Tranquillity, and a few I hadn’t yet heard, for those wondering).
It worked for you?
I entered AM/FM, Godspeed You Black Emporer!, and Seldom. I got back crap. The first group was a boy band, and the other two were bands I had heard and disliked tremendously. I think it’s got some learning to do in the indie world.
Yeah, I got back “Juliana Theory” who I don’t particularly like.
It did exactly what it was supposed to. Indie bands don’t have a very large following so it’s database probably hasn’t had many hits on the band to learn from yet. When it is learning a new band it needs to pick other bands at random until it gets enough responses back to be able to relate the new band.