Jon Udell notes interesting piece in NYT:
Polarized Nation: A study of purchase patterns of political books reveals that buyers of liberal books (blue) tend to buy only other liberal books, while buyers of conservative books (red) usually buy only other conservative books. Nonpartisan titles are gray. [The New York Times on the Web]
Udell notes an earlier interview he did with the author of the NYT piece, Valdis Krebs:
Given good pictures of social networks, what will we use them for? Valdis Krebs has lots of practical ideas. For example, consider Amazon’s related-book feature. If you follow these links a few steps out, says Krebs, clusters emerge, and sometimes those clusters represent disjoint interests connected only through one book. He offers Thomas Petzinger’s The New Pioneers as an example. It connected two different groups — one reading books on business and strategy, the other reading books on complexity science and chaos theory. Now there are a number of books that broker that connection, but Petzinger’s was one of the first popular books to do so, according to Krebs. [Jon Udell: A nation of polarized readers]
