An very interesting area of Web 2.0 are the music and book recommendation sites. Sites such as Last.fm, Goodreads and Pandora use your reported listening and reading habits to recommend other books and music you might like. They do this, in part, by comparing the reading and listening habits of all of their members and try to establish patterns. You’ve seen something similar in action on Amazon.com when “People who bought this item, also bought…” appears on the screen. Stereo manufacturer Harmon/Kardon now has a site called Amplified Journeys dedicated to providing playlists for roadtrips. Once they determine a playlist, you can easily purchase it from the world’s largest music retailer, the iTunes Music Store.

This should be of interest to libraries because one thing that we’ve traditionally done is recommend books, movies and music to people. It would be interesting to compare the results of Readers’ Advisory coming from Goodreads and librarians. The question we’d ask depends, I suppose, on our perspective. Would the website do better than the librarian? Would the librarian do better than the website?

Luckily, this isn’t an either or proposition. Libraries can have the best of both worlds, providing recommendations from librarians and also harnessing and assembling circulation data to provide electronic recommendations online.