26 February 2005

Media thesaurus

Long, long ago I discovered musicplasma and since have been using it to find bands-who-are-like-other-bands. Recently, they morphed into liveplasma and have integrated movies, actors, and directors in their engine. I haven't researched it, but I suspect that they leverage existing databases (IMDB, Amazon) and build their graphs from that data.

As they repurpose open data, Liveplasma also opens themselves up to repurposing by providing a means to link to search results (go to Help > Link Towards Liveplasma). Although their site is Flash and provides no Web service interface, making links available is square zero in opening your site and its functionality. Ideally, developers could provide Web sites based on data from Web service queries to Liveplasma, which is itself based on data queried (or screen-scraped) from Amazon or IMDB. For movies, those Web developers could also query RottenTomatoes, TVGuide, and MovieFone to combine the data to their needs: Liveplasma would define a group of related movies, RottenTomatoes would provide rankings, TVGuide and MovieFone would show when they're playing and where. Hell, Google Maps could be linked in to show the closest theaters.

  • My Cool Web Site
    • Liveplasma
      • Amazon
      • IMDB
    • RottenTomatoes
    • MovieFone
    • TVGuide
    • Google Maps
      • NAVTECH
      • Tele Atlas

But, we're a long way from that. Little is gained and much could be lost if Web sites open their data for free. So this is why everyone's yakkin' about micropayments [Wikipedia].

[ posted by sstrader on 26 February 2005 at 3:12:04 PM in Cinema ]