Any Club That Would Have Me

It's not news to any of us that each of us belongs to many different groups.

Just now, we're probably feeling an unusually strong identification with our political parties (if we have one), or our lack thereof. This is because, of course, politics is hot right now.

At other times, we might identify strongly with a church, a charitable group, the company we work for, or the school we attend. Most of us belong to a family group, an ethnic group, a club. We might even be regulars at a neighborhood bar.

NNDB is an data cruncher that wants to see how these various group identities track in the lives of the famous and the infamous. Or, as NNDB expresses it: "NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available (the usual information such as date of birth, a biography, and other essential facts.)

"But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been associating with."

"The crowd" can refer to family relations, corporate boards, movies and TV, political alliances, and shadowy conspiracy groups, and so on.

What can we learn about an individual, and about an individual's identity groups, by tracking all the subgroups to which that individual belongs? You've seen examples of this kind of thinking in celebrity magazines when stars dating habits are tracked, linking various stars to one another by virtue of their having dated the same person or persons.

Right now, the site is a little thin on relationships, with any given "important person's" page looking more like a laundry list of family, films, books, church affiliation, etc.

Slightly more interesting is the NNDB Mapper, that displays a visual representation of the many and varied links between well known people. The site even suggests what we presume are enlightening starting points, like Dick Cheney, and Barbara Walters. You can also enter the 3-D world via companies, organizations, bands, movies, and tv.

And no, I'm not on it yet!