Thinking about "interests"

Those "clouds of interest" meme things made me think about the whole "interest" feature and what it means, to me at least. gillo was asking me "if you like Steeleye Span, do you like Fairport..." and I was thinking, well, yes, but not enough to put it as an "interest," if you know what I mean... To me, those "interests" are what I think kind of define me, or represent some essential aspect of my life. Gah. That sounds too profound for a Saturday morning, but Steeleye Span for me was one of the first groups I discovered for myself as a teenager. I listened to their "Parcel of Rogues" album over and over and over and over again and knew all the words. Could sing them still,, probably. One of my interests is "chickadees" - well, they are my favourite birds in the whole world; sea otters are my favourite animals - after bearded collies of course. My second most obscure interest I think is Franz Bruggen (there's me and two others). Well, he's fairly famous now as a conductor and early music guy, but when I was in my early twenties I played baroque recorder fairly seriously, and he was IT, man; he was the only one (well, he and David Munro), making records. And I listened to HIS records over and over and over and over... (which reminds me, is early music in there? it should be...) My most obscure interest? "Computers in education"! It's literally me and one other guy!

Ooh! WAY cool link!!

This is like the late lamented "Visual Thesaurus" (which not really late because it is still there, but no fun any more because you have to pay after you've followed about three links), only it's a kind of ... I'm not quite sure how you'd describe it! Called The Literature Map, you type in an author, and you get a kind of mind-map of other authors that other people read who like that author, which is cool enough, but if you click on your original author you also get info on her (or him) and links to discussions, and all kinds of things. Very, very cool. Try it!

omg, there's more

It seems this Literature Map thing is attached to something called GNOD, which has maps like that for books, music and movies. I may never be seen again...

more linkages...

...and if you haven't checked the Geoffrey Chaucer blog lately, please do. It hath moved. It also hath "blogge t-shirtes" and a Brokeback mountain spoof ("I wolde I knewe how of thee I might be quitten!"). Someone not only has a great sense of humour but is very clever...