My friend Brian is my go-to guy when it comes to new music. I’m typically an ’80s hard rock, hair band kind of guy (Twisted Forever!), but I also can get into mellow, alternative stuff as well as poppy or folksy. Brian has about 900 million CDs in his collection, so whenever I’m in the mood for something new, I hit him up via IM and just tell him the “mood” I’m looking for in terms of music, and he’ll instantly shoot back 3 or 4 bands and albums for me to look into. He’s usually pretty dead on.

For comics, I have my friend Justin to give me some advice, but our tastes aren’t exactly 100% so it’s somewhat of a hit and miss. Plus he’s not too into the independent or small press world (which is either awesome or horrible depending upon what you grab), so that doesn’t help me there. Not to mention he’s not on IM 24/7, so at nights and weekends, I’m screwed.

What I’d love to see some genius programmer come up with is a Supreme Intelligence website that will grow and learn and recommend specific graphic novels for me to check out. It’d start off asking me a bunch of favorite books I like (or maybe similar to Amazon’s rate this purchase feature, you can give it a number rating, an I hate it rating or an I don’t want to vote rating) and then ask me some more general questions like:

• Do you follow titles or creators?
• Are you more of an artist’s fan or writer’s fan?
• Who’s your favorite character?
• What companies do you like?

That sort of thing. And much like those wacky “20 questions” AI web programs out there, this one would learn the more you use it. So it’d quickly see I love Alan Moore but after a few specific Halo Jones trade suggestions that I reject, it’d learn that my taste isn’t 100% loyalty.

The end result is I just want to go to a site and have it spit out some recommendations of books for me that are real targeted picks for me based on my tastes, rather than Amazon’s which is purely based on recent purchases.

Anyone up for the challenge? No Kree knowledge necessary…