The idea is that it's like Amazon recommending books or Last.fm recommending music (though the technique is quite different). In practice, once you're used to using it, it's a really fast way for jumping into a topic since you immediately see clusters around an article -- i.e. if you don't know anything about Literary Theory and want to figure out what the important articles and authors in the area are you can do so quickly. (An example a friend of mine used when looking for books on the topic, successfully, incidentally.)
My question would be, do you not associate what we're doing with recommendations or not see recommendations as valuable?
Cool for all the "knowledge management" aficionados, there's a whole industry around that. Also potentially useful for intranets / collaboration systems -- if at some point you can offer your API offline, i.e. as a library callable from code without having to depend on your web service. If I can package up your algorithms with a product I'm deploying, I'll be happy to pay for it (provided that real customer value is being added which for now I'm assuming).
My question would be, do you not associate what we're doing with recommendations or not see recommendations as valuable?