Not exactly a freakomendation

Monday Apr 28, 2008

Paul's been posting freakomendations, which are "unusual recommendations" (that's a bit of an understatement given your examples, Paul!)

John Scalzi posted that Amazon's recommender suggested that he might like The Last Colony, a book he wrote!

This is not necessarily a freakomendation, because it seems pretty likely that John would read books that the people who read The Last Colony had read, and by that measure the Amazon recommender worked pretty well. But, as you can see from the comments for that postings, doing things like this calls the quality of all of the recommendations into question. This is probably unfair to Amazon's recommender, but that's what you're (which is to say "we're") up against when building recommender systems.