structured serendipity

i recently discovered siteinspire.net, which is a (somewhat limited) database of interesting websites. nothing new about that, except that the sites are categorized really nicely. instead of the typical categories of 'personal', 'business', 'retail', etc., they have infinitely more useful categories like 'unusual navigation,' 'feminine,' 'big background images'. it just seemed like a much more useful way of finding websites, especially for people who make websites for a living. i think we need a way to extend such useful categorization to other media as well. every time i'm going on a trip, for instance, i spend a seriously unholy amount of time trying to find just the right book to carry with me--i have to find something that is not too heavy, because i can't really focus on airplanes, so it has to be fiction, an absorbing, simple tale; then it has to be not too heavy weight-wise so i can carry it easily down train stations and airports, so it should be paper back and also preferably under 300 pages; and then maybe it should be relevant to where i'm going, either set in the place or somehow related to it. sometimes, only sometimes, i've managed to make just the right match, like when i matched into the wild with ladakh or, too obviously, the beach with goa. but mostly i've failed at this quite miserably (i carried stieg larsson's third to bhopal; it was the totally wrong weight and size to hold lying flat on a hard train seat and only at the last minute i discovered character-fatigue had set in after the first two parts). this is of course just one kind of situation in which you need to pick a book based on useful criteria. and likewise for music. i happened to hear a really awesome song sung in pashto a while ago and want to listen to more pashto music but sadly i can only browse for music by 'artist' and 'album' and 'year'. or like maybe i'm going on a road trip and i want to create a playlist of good road songs. and then there are movies and and it can all get infinitely more specialized. sort of like a greeting card model for media. or a directory with logical-emotional categorization.

i wouldn't want this to be mixed up with social networking. sure i can go ask questions on forums and get people's opinions and all, but i don't want people to have to go through that mess and spend all that time. the experience should be one of flipping through a directory. simple. the results could be improved by having users vote on them but that's about it. and for people to be able to create their own categories, like amazon lists but more searchable, useful. moderated. curated. serendipitous.