MIT technology review, which apparently has been published since 1899 according to the cover, in May 2008 published an article by Michael Schrage, “Recommendation Nation”. The last few paragraphs:

For all my excitement about the future of recommendation services, I can’t help feeling the way I felt about search in 2001. Existing recommendation engines have a lot of value, but they’re still primitive. Distinctions between browsing and comparison (that is, between looking at products and choosing between them) are poorly understood. We’ve yet to see how user-generated tags make product and service descriptions more precise and useful. The more specific, explicit, and time-sensitive the tag, the better the potential recommendations will be.

Smart people all over the world are working on these problems. Billions of dollars are at stake. Netflix is offering a million dollars to anyone who can improve the efficacy of its (exceptionally successful) recommendation engine. That’s a small price to pay for a company whose future depends on its ability to compete with Blockbuster and the digital video delivery companies of the future. It is an interesting and important problem, because it’s not only individuals who watch the movies, but couples, families, and friends. Perhaps the winning algorithm will be optimized for the preferences of groups.

When I get good recommendations, I spend my time and money differently. Even better recommendations will dramatically increase the value of that time and money. That’s a digital future I crave and expect. I hope Internet innovators take my recommendations as seriously as I take theirs.

Not that we need the validation. The point is I fully agree that better recommendations are needed especially as we are increasingly overwhelmed by mounds of content.

Movie lovers are a pretty intense bunch.  And we should know - we’re rather insane movie lovers ourselves.  But it seems that two classes of film lovers are poised for an all-out war.  A recent /film blog post reports that The Dark Knight has overtaken The Godfather on the IMDb Top 250 list:

The Godfather has fallen to the #3 spot, after nearly a decade at the top of the Internet Movie Database’s listing of the Top 250 Movies of All Time [...]The Dark Knight overtook The Godfather’s throne, but this latest development is really interesting because it might show evidence of a fanboy mob at work. Could it be that Dark Knight fans are intentionally voting down Godfather in hopes of keeping The Dark Knight at the top spot? Why else would The Shawshank Redemption have overtaken The Godfather in a time when neither film is in the public forefront? The percentage of users who gave Godfather a 1 out of 10 (the lowest rating possible) grew from 6.1% to 6.4%, just enough to push Shawshank ahead, while the percentage of participating users who loved the film, giving it a 10 out of 10, remained the same (57%). It’s also worth noting that while any IMDb user can vote and effect a movie’s overall rating, only regular IMDb users can influence the film’s top 250 placement.

Nevermind the irony; The Dark Knight is in part about an insane, brilliant criminal besting the mob world.  The problem is, this isn’t a question about which one is better.  This isn’t McCain vs. Obama - after all, The Godfather is a frickin’ bad-ass movie.  And as far as Batman goes, Ledger’s performance as The Joker is, as everyone is aware, pretty much one of the best-performed roles any of us have ever seen.  No, comparing the two movies is hardly useful.  The real question is whether or not The Dark Knight can stand the test of time, as The Godfather has.  That will take a bit of time, so that whatever hype still exists concerning The Dark Knight will have settled into genuine criticism.  The IMDb Top 250 as currently rendered is not really sophistocated enough to handle that type of comparison.  So how can we control for new movies making a big splash?

For starters, the formula used to calculate the list (at the bottom of the Top 250 page) could incorporate temporal effects, so that movies that have been consistently popular throughout time would be rated higher than movies whose true mettle has not been tested by the sands of time.  (I’ll try to keep this post supremely non-technical, so as not to scare anyone away, but those of you who would understand the necessary math can probably imagine what I’m thinking.  Perhaps next time we can delve into the math-ey stuff).  A statistician or econometrician would have already thought of a few ways of using ratings over time.  So consider the following: The Godfather has been number one for about ten years, and has had a consistent number of people continually rate it high over the course of the IMDB’s tenure.  That’s the mark of a good movie - if new generations rediscover it, and love it just as much as those who first saw it, then that movie is a real winner.  If a movie makes a big splash when it first comes out, but putters about years (or even months) after (or simply fades away), then it doesn’t deserve its spot.  Its hard to say whether or not it’ll matter for The Dark Knight in the long run, but I bet you’d see some serious reshuffling of the other movies on the list.  The Incredibles might finally lose to The Graduate.  Finally.

The Dark Knight is a great movie - everyone at HelloMovies adored it (except Stan, but he hates everything ) - but if we have to wait to see whether or not people will rate it consistently well enough over time to consider it a classic, then we might as well factor the movie’s age and temporal distribution of ratings into the Top 250 calculation and save movie fans the trouble.  That way, if a bunch of fanboys vote down Vito Corleone, nothing saddening like the don dropping to number three could ever occur, unless said fanboys somehow manage a many-years long siege on that castle.  And it’s not like the IMDb doesn’t have data to tune the right parameters to make it happen, either.  No doubt IMDb has probably thought of this already, but it’s mighty hard to change an institution like the Top 250 and keep users from revolting.  But hey, any true movie fan should already be raging against the machine on this amazing upset.  This might be just the catalyst IMDb needs to change things up!

A few of us went down to Los Angeles this past weekend to speak with some film industry experts and immerse ourselves in Hollywood culture. On Friday we met with Kevin Chang who works for Kevin Misher, a big producer for Paramount that has worked on Rudy, Donnie Brasco, Fast and the Furious, Meet the Parents and most recently the Interpreter starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. On Saturday we met with Leonard Rabinowitz, president of StudioCL, who launched the Carole Little clothing line worn by such actresses as Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Alba and has invested in several film projects. And on Sunday, we ended our trip at the El Caballero Country Club where we met Tom Sherak, former chairman of 20th Century Fox Domestic Film Group and former partner at Revolution Studios.

Some key things we learned during our meetings: 65% of box office sales today actually come from overseas. With the margins for film becoming increasingly compressed, studios continue to search for new ways to understand their audiences and market appropriate films to each person’s tastes.

There’s a good chance we’ll be making more visits to LA in the coming months and we hope to continue meeting new friends and business partners.

I saw an article on TechCrunch today about an interested start-up called Snooth. It essentially a very comprehensive Web 2.0 database of wines. While I cannot claim myself to be a wine connoisseur, I admit that I stuck around for a while just browsing the selections and seeing what I can do. It turns out that they do a lot of cool stuff, like user reviews, ratings, and tags, all of which make the experience much more rich than just a database of wines. I wouldn’t know where to even start searching when it comes to wines, but I quickly discovered that you can search for things like “good with pork” or “dessert” or “from france”, which I thought was really cool. Plus, their user interface is elegant and intuitive, which made browsing the site very easy and enjoyable. While I still can’t reveal exactly what we’re doing at HelloMovies, I’ll say that we really like a lot of the elements on Snooth and will seek to replicate the experience to some degree.

Stan

Steven and I had an interesting conversation late Wednesday night (by the way, we’re roommates)–we were talking about the sub-prime lending meltdown and how it’s affecting the rest of the economy. Earlier that day, I was listening to some guest on NPR’s Fresh Air argue how an American recession is inevitable due to: weakened banks (i.e. sub-prime lending flop), diminishing dollar, and rising oil prices. Not that I believe everything that I hear from the media, but this guy’s arguments did make a lot of sense to me and made me feel a bit paranoid about the future.

However, not everyone is predicting doom and gloom. Today, Mark Hendrickson wrote a cool article on TechCrunch speculating that the current problems in the banking and real estate sectors could actually drive more money to Silicon Valley. In a survey of 862 real estate, mortgage, and financial workers, 56.2% of respondents claimed they were seriously thinking about starting a business within the next six months–many of these people had an eye on starting tech businesses.

So the positive takeaway from this article is that the tech entrepreneurship sector could be doing okay even if other parts of the economy are faltering (principle of creative destruction?); however, Hendrickson raises a great question–do we really want a bunch of big corporation people becoming entrepreneurs?

Let’s see if history repeats itself…