Scripting News: A bootstrap begins with a lot of typing

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

A bootstrap begins with a lot of typing

I'm starting to play with ideas for an exchange format for movie ratings. To stimulate this thinking I needed a good list to work with, and luckily Netflix, even though they don't provide a way to export your ratings, does provide a way to view them. A screen shot for non-members.

So I drank a cup of coffee, turned on some music, and in about an hour copied all the reviews (over 300) into a text file, organized by the number of stars I gave a movie. It was actually an interesting exercise, I changed the ratings of some movies, and thought of movies I hadn't rated that should be included.

I think a good user interface for a new collaborative rating service would be something like Hot Or Not, where you get the name of a movie, a picture of some kind, a one paragraph synopsis, and a chance to rate it with 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1 stars. Of course it would link to a page where you could rent the movie, read reviews, or write one yourself.

One thing this project is going to need, clearly, is a web service that takes the name of a movie and a year, and returns a globally unique identifier, preferrably the address of a web page with information about the movie.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:27 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Jul Sep