So Needle, the data-analysis system I use for the Discordance, is being shut down June 1st. I'm still going to maintain empath, my EM-based similarity-matrix, and although I'm not going to try to reproduce the whole sprawling Discordance on my own site, most of the individual views in it are easy to recreate, so are there ones that people found particularly valuable over time, as opposed to just interesting once?

Out of the entirety of the Discordance, the data sets I found myself returning to most often were Awfulness, Leaderboard by Style, Mixed Feelings, Reviewer Marketplace, Most/Least Consistent Bands, Name-Word Pairs, and Enthusiasm.

Definitely the best releases from each sub-genre by review average.

Definitely the best albums by year.

OK, I've started moving stuff over to empath. So far I have:

- band similarity
- band leaderboards by style, country and career-length
- release leaderboards by style, country and year
- reviewer leaderboard by review-count

Feel free to lobby for other things you'd like me to add, and I'll see what I can do.

http://furia.com/em/

The reviewer leader board now also links to individual pages for every reviewer with at least 25 reviews, with their style/country/year/band tendencies and a ranked list of similar reviewers. E.g. this one for doomknocker.

How exactly are calculated the similar reviewers? Based on the type of albums/bands/genres reviewed?

The band similarity is based on overlapping reviewers, and the reviewer similarity is based on overlapping bands reviewed. Both are calculated the exact same way, and no other factors are involved in the calculations, although obviously people who like the same styles are more likely to review the same bands, so it's all connected indirectly.

If you're curious about the actual math, which isn't very complicated, I described it in an old blog post.

I'm lobbying for the following, assuming they can be saved:

From the reviews and reviewers section:

-Reviews/Style
-Reviews/Country
-Mixed Feelings (I see I'm not completely alone on this )

From the Review Challenge section:

-Challenge History
-Prolific and Unreviewed

Well, the big grids were cool in Needle because all the numbers were live links, which will take some more work to reproduce. Eventually, perhaps, but I have some other stuff I have to rescue in basic form first.

Mixed Feelings is amusing, but perhaps not of enduring value or wide appeal. But your enthusiasms are definitely noted!

Yeah, I'm really bummed out that Google is shutting it down, it's a cool little gimmick that I can refer to, especially to reminisce on my own evolution as a metal consumer, particularly of the more extreme styles that I barely dabbled in several years back. I guess the review/style one is a big one for me because I've been actively trying to broaden my horizons and that particular feature gave me an objective scale by which to measure it.

Save what you can, and I'll enjoy the Needle version for the remaining 1 1/2 months that it's still around.

Is there any way you can make something have the same design as Needle did? Empath looks horribly unorganized.

OzzyApu, what part of the organization is bugging you? I'm going for a much more minimalist design here than I used for Needle, but it isn't supposed to be hard to find things! Especially since there are a lot fewer things! Is it that you don't like the tag-cloud-ish similarity index? Or that I've put the explanations for things at the bottoms of pages rather than the top? Or the index links across the top rather than down the left? Or is it something else?

hells_unicorn, yeah, believe me, nobody is more bummed to see Needle go away than I am. Literally. I spent 5 years of my life designing the thing. But it had a server farm, and I don't, so I'm going to keep empath simple for the time being, at least, and focus on the things I'm doing that aren't in EM itself, like the similarity calculations and my quirky scoring method. That said, though, it's no harder for me to show the complete breakdowns by style/country/year/band on the individual reviewer pages (like yours), rather than just the "favored" ones, so I'll update those shortly.

Just compare how Needle looks with a lot better structure, more information, and all the data neatly organized on the left-hand side. The huge reduction of data and the clouds don't exactly help finding what data users specifically want to look for, if that makes sense. For instance, on Needle, it was super easy to find your name and pick it, and then see a whole lot of info regarding anything.

I guess my main complaint it he look of it. For sure, the minimalist design is part of it - the fact that you can't cross over every bit of data. Empath looks amateurish as hell, like Rule34.

To me, this: http://flickcabin.com/pfiles/142564/Untitled.png
http://flickcabin.com/pfiles/142565/Untitled%201.png

Looked way better than these:
http://flickcabin.com/pfiles/142566/Untitled%202.png
http://flickcabin.com/pfiles/142567/Untitled%203.png

But that's something you can't control, so no ragging on you personally.











EDIT:
Warning: BIG PICTURES

Those images you put in aren't working for me, so I don't know which specific screens you were referring to, but obviously I know what both things look like. There's going to be a lot less information, for sure. But I'm filling in some of the missing stuff for each band and each reviewer, and there's a band index and a reviewer index (with no pesky pagination, so Ctrl-F in your browser to find anything on those long pages), so hopefully it's pretty straightforward to get to what's there. And I'll keep fiddling with it because, well, I can't help it. If there are any specific things you find really awkward, feel free to note them and I'll see what I can do. The whole thing is pointless unless people find it interesting and intelligible. Or interesting and intelligible enough, anyway.

OK, I added a bunch more stuff, particularly to the reviewer pages, and did a little style tweaking to make the navigation a bit more distinct. Not sure it'll make any difference to you, but take a look and see..

Wow I can't believe I never knew about either of these tools until today. Thanks for all the work you've done and continue to do with it. I know I'll be using this constantly now that I know about it.

Looks like you've got all the important stuff. The new pages for individual reviewers are awesome. Good work!

Indeed amazing, and I had no idea either. And now it's being shut down? Great, thanks Google! I'll be using it as long as it's still there (and switch to the new one afterwards)... great work indeed!

Can someone explain what the "biased score" means on the reviewers page?

I like these features too. Very informative and interesting.

"Bias score" is basically a fancy weighted average. The way it works is that for any set of scores, you sort them high to low, and then weight them in a descending geometric ratio. The first one counts 1/2, the second one counts 1/3, the third 1/4, etc. And at the end you divide by the sum of those weights. So effectively this gives positive ratings precedence over negative ones, and the more high ratings you have, the less the low ones count against you. I think this produces a single number that is more representative of both passions and prominence than an average.

For releases and bands, I also always add a 100 and a 0 in addition to the actual ratings. Intuitively, this kind of represents the idea that there's always somebody who loves a thing and somebody who hates it, even if they haven't shown up to file a review yet, and is similar in mathematical purpose to dividing by n-1 in a sample standard deviation.

Plus EM itself already shows averages, so I thought it was more interesting for my version to show something else...