By way of Lifehacker, comes this distracting, fun, but not always accurate new thingy: literature-map. Type in an author's name and watch him or her get mapped in two-space with other well known writers. Kinda cool. (Make sure not to click away too soon! The maps evolve dramatically after a few seconds).
Not always accurate however. Seeing C.S Lewis and Frank Peretti almost on top of each other almost made me spit Coke Classic all over the monitor via my nose. On the other hand, I can totally see David Foster Wallace occupying the same litscape as Salman Rushdie.
One tip for the litmap geeks (since they all read my blog, you know): I don't know if you're using factor analysis or what to come up with the topographies, but you could easily make it complex by using font size to make 3-d literary tag-clouds.
Here are litmaps for a couple of my faves:
Larry McMurtry
Umberto Eco
Jose Saramago
Anne Lamott
And some smarty pants somewhere in the T'rati dungeons must be working on more generalized 3-D tag clouds. Don't ya think? Psych.
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