Slashdot Mirror
IMDb Turns 15
An anonymous reader writes "15 years ago today, Col Needham posted some shell scripts to rec.arts.movies which allowed anyone to search lists of actors, actresses, directors, and biographies. From this humble beginning -- which predates Yahoo, Google, and even the web itself -- the IMDb has wrangled the collective wisdom of millions of submitters to become not only a top 100 website but also a standard Hollywood tool for filmmaking. IMDb is celebrating with a retrospective of the last 15 years of IMDb and movies. Congratulations to IMDb and the internet community that built it."
Leaves me with the feeling that bigness + age != niceness.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
ITS A MOVIE SITE. When the hell were movies NON-BLOODY-COMMERCIAL?!
The site has a huge database, it's very easy and trustworthy to use.... it has some crap. So what? So does every site that needs to make money.
Shut it.
NetHack
I love IMDB, but I really think they ought to change their name by now. They have info on movies, television, video games, you name it.
I think it is the fact they have a four-letter domain that is the stopper. Finding a short domain name is tough, or in the case of four letters, impossible.
Click here or here.
I know it's not popular to read the article, but you apparently didn't even read the whole comment you're replying to.
Not protocols, services. That at least eliminates FTP, Gopher, IRC, Telnet, and SSH. Whether or not you want to consider hosting Finger, Whois, and NNTP to be a service is debateable. Things you can access using these protocols, however, might be services.
# Agent information and other data has been moved off of the free IMDb site and onto IMDbPRO, which I refuse to use.
There's little real need for the non-industry to know agent information.
# To insert data into this database, such as photographs of my favourite actors, costs money. This was
supposed to be a free site.
It's absolutely free to use. A site of that size can't live off of goodwill, sunshine, and gumdrops. I'll take a bit of annoyance to have it retain the useful information.
# Flagrant product placement. Virtually every "article" on IMDb's front page is a paid advertisement. Most "articles" are just used to link to Ama$on items.
They are a resource, not a content provider. There are thousands of useful review sites What else do you want? If you really want to complain about sucking the corporate teat, at least bitch about AICN, IMDB makes no pretenses of objectivity.
# IMDb has given nothing back to the community; rather it takes from the community (the poor) and gives to a large e-tailer (the rich).
It provides a huge service to the community. They don't owe *you* specifically a damn thing.
When the hell were movies NON-BLOODY-COMMERCIAL?!
While I have my disagreements with the original post, your rebuttal is lacking.
Movies are shared culture, and despite how the MPAA likes to assert property rights to every dimension of commercial film, movies are more than simply business. The stories they borrow from and the stories they tell are all public knowledge and are not owned by anyone.
So the history article says the site was founded with lists long culled by rec.arts.movies regulars, and that these lists are the "backbone" of the site to this day. Did any of these people ever get paid, particularly when Amazon.com acquired the site?
If by "wrangled" you mean "took contributions that users gave to the community for free, and used them to make money" then yes. Wrangled. Our friends at GraceCDDBNote are great wranglers too.
..a community project which evolved into a company just bringing money to a very small percentage of people involved in the original project. How sad.
Movies are shared culture, and despite how the MPAA likes to assert property rights to every dimension of commercial film, movies are more than simply business. The stories they borrow from and the stories they tell are all public knowledge and are not owned by anyone.
Er... how very... communist(?) of you.
The fact of the matter is movies have been a business since they were invented. This is not like the music industry, where music existed prior to the music industry - movies did not exist prior to the movie industry. Movies were an industry ever since Thomas Edison invented the kinetograph, which he developed specifically looking for new ways to make money. Movies themselves have been copyrighted for as long as it occured to anyone to do so. That includes the stories, which sure as hell are owned by those that write them, at least until they sell those stories to a studio or producer (at which point they are then owned by the studio or producer). Movie plots don't write themselves, despite the wishes of most Hollywood producers.
Sure, movies are a part of our culture, but just because something's a part of our culture doesn't mean it's not also copyrighted (and copyrightable) as well as a commercial enterprise.
The ratings are somewhat helpful. I find that the audience is a bit too young and haven't seen enough films not made by Spielberg and Lucas, but you take that into account. And there's always been the film studies poseurs, the 13 year-olds, the fanboys etc that you have to filter out when reading reviews but that has always been part of the fun. Marketing shills are becoming too numerous and tedious though.
Still it's very useful for settling arguments and figuring out where you've seen that babe/hunk before. Also it can be cathartic to post a rant about how badly you just wasted your last 10 bucks...
IMDb has a page for this
Unfortunately, it appears to be censored.
Sure, movies are a part of our culture, but just because something's a part of our culture doesn't mean it's not also copyrighted (and copyrightable) as well as a commercial enterprise.
How does your statement conflict, rebut or otherwise disagree with my point that, "movies are more than simply business"?
Really, what is the point of your entire post?
Do you like jousting at windmills and strawmen or something?
a wiki by the name of MovieWiki. It still seems to be in the works, but with more help, it could be an awesome replacement for IMDb. (Disclaimer: I work there)
First of all, I don't think that a standard wiki is a terribly good idea for something like this, as all the pages need to be updated manually. Part of the power of the IMDB is that everything is cross-referenced. Take Bruce Willis as an example. With your Wiki clicking on most of the links on http://digitalsubstance.com/wiki/Bruce_Willis, will take you to a blank page for you to edit - it should (at the *very* least) be a template, with Bruce Willis' name already in the correct spot, with a link back to the Willis page (again, already completed.)
This is the perfect app for a relational database, and wikis are not relational. There is just *way* too much redundant information here - a wiki will collapse under its weight once you go over 10,000 entries or so.
Second, if you really want to pursue this - it needs more data. IIRC data cannot be copyrighted (only the format of the data), so you can snag an old version of the IMDB data (or, if a lawyer tells you that's a bad idea, you can at least get a head start by getting the last public version of the IMDB data from USENET.)
But unless you're a masochist (and you believe that everyone who is going to contribute is as well), I'd first recommend designing a relational DB (a real relational DB, with proper constraints) with a custom front-end, then trying to populate it with data. Wikis may be cool, and it may be something you know how to admin, but it's just the wrong tool for the job.
Nothing? Nothing at all? Not even a free ad-supported site that gives you information on every movie you've ever heard of, and a hundred times more that you've never heard of? I use it all the time, and have never given them anything, except a bit of information here or there over the years.
I've always thought of IMDB as precisely the kind of information resource the web was made for. Each of hundreds of thousands of contributors spends a small amount of time entering what they know, and everyone gets the benefit of all that information, 24x7, for free. What do you expect from them?
My fear was always that they'd take the information away by making it a subscription site, but they haven't done that. They may be Amazon (whom I don't like either), but give them a break already. Would you have sold for $20 mil?