A bootstrap begins with a lot of typing

Friday, August 17, 2007 by Dave Winer.

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.