Infloox – What Are Famous People Reading?
Infloox happens to be a very unique site. It’s more than just a tabloid catalog of what Brad and Angelina are reading and who Oprah’s latest top author is. It’s an unusual networking tool for curious people who want to know what influences their favorites. Ever wonder who Isaac Asimov consider his favorite author? How about Stephen King? Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Infloox.com bills itself as “the website on influential peoples influential books.” That misses half the point, I think.
Here’s how the site works. From our list above, you can enter “Stephen King” in the search box at Infloox. The result is a short biography in three sentences, a short list (linking to more) of his books, his Infloox (3-5 favorite authors and books, which are hotlinked), who on Infloox he’s influenced (other Infloox members), and his Outfloox (who he’s influenced).
Both Infloox (Stephen King’s influences and which Infloox members he’s influenced) have links to the forums where you can go and discuss these topics and interests with other site members.
More than that, though, you can enter country names and find out favorite authors in those countries as well as authors from that country. So, for instances, entering “Russia” as a search term, you get famous persons from history (Catherine II), and a list of books and authors from that country, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky.
In fact, you can basically search for anything and see if there’s a matching correlation of book or author favorites. Searching for job types (“engineer”) or titles (“Miss America”) can be fascinating stuff.
Much of the information on Infloox is input as a wiki. Site members can ad, update, change, or mark for deletion anything on the site’s results. So if you fancy yourself a biographical expert on Bob Marley, you could help build his information and database of items.
Finally, site members (registration is free) can build their own profile to better find others to interact with. Making this more than just an ultra-searchable wiki, but also a social network. You can find matches for your favorite books or authors and strike up conversations or forum discussions, collaborate on adding more information to the wiki, etc.
Infloox is a great site and definitely worth checking out if you’re an author, celebrity, politics, or media hound. Be prepared to spend some time there, though.
