Valdis Krebs has found a really interesting use of some Amazon book data. Amazon suggests books based on “People who bought this book also bought X”. Valdis uses this information to graph the left and right of the American political spectrum. You can find the graph and some background here.

How can there ever be a productive political debate when the two sides don’t take the time to understand the other sides arguments?

This graph was built with social network mapping software called InFlow. It’s interesting to see computers being used to study the relationships between people.