Pretty exciting!
How did this happen? I contacted some guys at KBVR-FM (the campus radio station) about genielab.com a while back. Turns out one of them, Andrew Nealon, is also a wordsmith for the school newspaper and he liked the site so much he offered to do an article in addition to spreading the word at the radio station. So today the Barometer ran his article on genielab.
I’m pleased with the article, I think it turned out great. But I gotta make one minor correction so I can save face amoung my computer science cohorts. The article says “GenieLab.com [is] one of the first active recommendation systems on the Internet.” While I guess that statement is true (based on your definition of “one of the first”), it still makes me sound a little presumptuous. What I think the author was trying to get at was a part of our conversation where we were talking about active vs. passive recommender systems. I was explaining that GenieLab was active, and that the popular music recommendation systems today (audioscrobbler, musicmobs, etc) are all passive. With GenieLab, you just tell it what you like. With a passive system, it watches and tries to learn what you like. There are other active music recommendation systems out there today, but I think GenieLab is pretty far ahead of them in terms of usability and the quality of recommendations. Ooops, I still sound presumptuous. My bad. ;-p