and a blog post http://kurtisrandom.blogspot.com/2010/05/return-of-catfishsmooth.html
CatfishSmooth is a website that finds connections between music artists. For each artist, you will see the type of "similar artist" recommendations to which you are accustom - we use last.fm and echonest to get these. But you will also see some other inter-artist connections catfish has discovered from the web of linked data. These include things like "artists that are also English Male Singers" or "artists that are also Converts To Islam" or "artists that are also People From St.Louis, Missouri". And, hopefully, you'll get some media for each artist so you can have a listen.
Everything is based around MusicBrainz ids. From the MusicBrainz id we can use the BBC/music site and sameAs.org to plug in to the world of linked data. sameAs gives us links to DBpedia (an RDF version of Wikipedia) which allows us to make some really cool SPARQL queries. Many of these queries leverage the types created by the YAGO project.
Currently CatfishSmooth uses no database - everything comes from API calls and SPARQL queries. In the future we hope to allow users to log-in and create semantically annotated playlists. It would also be nice if the user could select lists that were interesting and remove lists that are boring (i.e. "living people"). We also hope to include more links from MySpace, BBC, Discogs, and others.
CatfishSmooth is only as good as the data it can find. This means it's not very useful for some "long tail" artists who don't have a Wikipedia page or a MusicBrainz page.
MusicBrainz WS
sameAs.org
DBtune.org/musicbrainz/sparql
dbpedia.org/sparql
echonest rosetta stone api
last.fm api
youtube api
Kurt has been working on this site off and on for about a month - so maybe that's cheating and should disqualify him from any potential hack day schwag (also he's not physically present at the hackday). He wanted to build a boxee client this WE but was too busy squashing bugs in the core. He just wanted to share ;-)