Interestingly enough, I just visited Last.Fm as well and noticed the very same trend:

Music and personality: A fascinating study that looks at how you can judge a persons personality by his/her musical preference. According to this study, people were better judges of a person when listening to the type of music they liked than they were then they met the person briefly face-to-face. I wonder if this kind of information can be used by dating sites to better match personality types or look at someones changes in music preference over time and see how that maps to his/her personality changes. Last.fm provides an API to access this information so it is feasible to try it on yourself or people you have known for a while (who of course have been using Last.Fm for sometime). I imagine this data could get increasingly more interesting for research purposes as Last.Fm ages.

Website credibility: An old (dated 2001) but more relevant than ever study on what users perceive as being a credible website (the key components being trustworthiness & expertise). Recommend everyone working with websites of any kind to look at it if you haven’t already done so.

MapThatPad: Last but not least, a website that helps you with your apartment hunting process on Craigslist. This is pretty much what I wanted when I was searching for apartments a few months ago.

Non-profits and benevolence: The latest Wired issue has a very interesting piece on the philosophy behind craigslist and the people behind craigslist and it reminded me very much of this Startup School presentation by Paul Graham on the parallels between a founding a start up and a non-profit. The article points out all the idiosyncracies that have made craigslist so different from other websites and are largely to blame for its tremendous growth. Craig Newmark had, from the very beginning, built the site to be as minimal, out-of-way and respectful of its users, partly mirroring his own quiet, polite and quirky personality which has been a huge reason for its success – so much so that its users came back even after the first CEO set up a coup to steal traffic away from craigslist to his own for-profit site. Craigslist is arguably regarded as the model for startups in this day an age – $100M in revenue with only 30 employees – operationally lean and very efficient. While I am a big fan of the site, there are still some aspects of the site I would like to see improved and while I can see why this may not be craigslist’s priority or concern, they certainly should enable and allow other developers to build tools to help its users use their service better.