The Economist as the center of the magazine world

Created for the board of directors of The Economist, this visual shows the “people who read this also read that” links from Amazon.com’s recommendation engine. The punch line: Regardless of whether you’re a sports freak, a computer nerd or a policy wonk, The Economist is your general news source of choice.

For this visual, I wrote a program in Perl (this was before the days of Python and BeautifulSoup) to crawl through Amazon’s book and magazine recommendations and generate a graph database. How is Soldier of Fortune connected to Martha Stewart’s Living? It’s not six degrees of separation. Try two.

The project yielded lots of insights about clusters of common interests among readers. We all live in our own bubbles.