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A Peek Into Netflix Queues
margaret writes "The New York Times has an interactive Web app where you can map the popularity of various Netflix titles by neighborhood, in a dozen different cities. Invasion of privacy or harmless voyeuristic fun? Either way, it's pretty interesting."
porn, now that's where it'd get interesting...
Anyone else notice that Knowing's rank seems inversely proportional to Rachel Getting Married's rank?
...that people have no lives and don't have enough business of their own. I mean seriously. I can think of so many better things to be doing with my time than looking at what people are renting based on their ZIP code. WHO CARES!?
Just because we have the ABILITY to get this information doesn't mean we SHOULD get it.
Get a life people and MOVE ON!
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
Looking at the Seattle map one interesting thing stands out for me. The rentals in the zip code of Seattle University seems completely different then everywhere else. What is interesting that ' pseudo intellectual' movies that you would think would be more popular, Milk, Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, are relatively low in this area of learning, while mindless movies, Role Models, House Bunny, where the most popular.
You can use it as an indication of how different regions feel about homosexuality by looking at the rental patterns for Milk (no link, sorry, you'll have to click through the movies until you find it). It was a lot more popular on the west side of the bay than the east side, which also matched voting patterns for proposition 8 (the west side was a lot more strongly opposed to it). In Boston it seems like they are a lot more open minded, except in area code 02126. Don't know what happened there.
Strangely enough, Milk is in the top 3 movies in San Francisco in every area except the Castro. Try explaining that one if you can.
Qxe4
People in NYC are going to be a lot more aware of hype surrounding something because of all the ads in NYC.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Does anyone know how they created that map? I know it's Flash, but how did they make it? Is there a library in Flash which can make these maps? Is this built with an open source libary? Just currious...
Well, they *had* an interactive application that did this. Now it's a smouldering hunk.
Invasion of privacy or harmless voyeuristic fun?
What invasion of privacy? They're not showing what any particular person rented, just what the aggregate in a given area liked. If this is invasion of privacy, then so is any demographic statistic saying, for instance, that New Yorkers like hot dogs from a stand on the street or the baseball stadium over that cooked at home.
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
You could draw many fun, but useless conclusions from this data. This is probably the kind of info that sales pukes, marketing drones and security theater types drool over.
Mad Men was only rented by those Hollywood types in Glendale and West LA
Tyler Perry's chitlin flicks do well in South Central, Inglewood and Long Beach - why?
Religulous' demographics proves that rich people really are godless.
White people really liked Australia, but Vicky Cristina Barcelona is better than the US Census for racial profiling.
Crooked cop movies, Pride and Glory, do well in "concentrated urban areas" - interesting.
Pinapple Express proves that some things are universal - legalize it
Could perhaps be explained by europeans using VPN accounts in these areas to access netflix.
Hmm, seems the worse the neighborhood the higher the ranking for Paul Blart Mall Cop.
Look, I think this stuff is kinda interesting, but you need to be very careful with information visualisation of geographical regions. And some of this information is a little misleading.
Some neighbourhoods are smaller in size (area) than others. If a neighbourhood is larger in area than another, a dominant colour (such as red!) will be highly dominant - not just because the movie is more popular - but because there is more red and the area is larger. This is a psychological thing; eyes are drawn to larger objects (yeah baby!) and we see fewer shades of red to blue (a physics thing).
Are the number of people in a neighbourhood more than another neighbourhood? How the borders are defined really needs to be stated. Using point sources of density would have been more appropriate (eg http://www.time.com/time/covers/20061030/where_we_live/
I could be full of shit as I've had a few white wines and we had a lovely 30 degree day out in the sun after a few weeks of cloudy rain.
.
This is an extremely dangerous tool. If you are looking to live in an area, you can use this tool to see the proportion of (say) blacks and hispanics (through the choice of movies), and then decide to move/not move there, thus encouraging the creation of racial ghettos.
Studies have proved time and again that multi-cultural communities are more stable (socially and economically) than mono-culture communities.
If this was an interactive map that showed where ethnic minorities lived, there would be an uproar. It's just too subtle for people to notice this way.
That is Mattapan; sometimes affectionately referred to as Murderpan. There is a very large criminal element there, and as the name implies, a very high murder rate. That alone cannot explain it though, unless you see significant dips in Dorchester and other high crime areas. I don't really care enough to look, since I don't really think you can make reasonable conclusions even when having local/inside information about a region based on this kind of data. About all you can do is theorize, which is all well and good, as long as you realize that you cannot take it any further than that, or test the veracity of your theory. Since I see no benefit to formulating an untestable theory I don't think it makes much sense to advance one, except for the pure entertainment value, if that happens to be something you find entertaining.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Letter to the Editor @ NY Times:
Dear Sir,
I find it highly innappropriate that you have made my personal information available via your website!
Sincerely,
Dr. Sanfransisco Bayarea
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Can you get other areas of the country (since this is on Google maps, etc) or did Netflix only give out certain areas/did the New York Times only map these cities?
note: this ranking is biased by instant viewing.
"instant view" titles are those you watch on your computer (or roku or xbox or whatever). they are "second tier" movies only. but, because they are convenient, they got a TON more views than movies you have to actually get the CD mailed to you for.
so, what you're seeing here is a hybrid list, with "top tier" movies vote counts watered down by over-counts of instant-play-ables.
fwiw.
The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much.
We love us some gay and lesbian movies.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
I am in despair over the newspaper industry. The country and the world has needed news researchers, and over the last half-century that has been the province of big newspapers like the Times, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others.
Lately, though, newspapers subscription rates have fallen dramatically, their income has fallen even faster, and they're all cut back on their research budgets.
Here, though, we see a truly interesting tool, one that gives more insight the more one plays with it (as the long articles in newspapers used to do the same as you read through them.) The credit list on this webapp is long, the quality of the presentation is absolutely top-notch, and the bandwidth behind it apparently infinite. That the New York Times would do this is commendable.
Would CNN.com do this? Could Google News do this? Drudgereport? No, those sites are merely aggragators. They are only interested in what happened in the last 24 hours, at best.
But, unfortunately for the Times, this remarkable tool is inaccessible in their dead-tree edition. I suppose it is a loss-leader for them, and a worthwhile one, but it does reinforce all the thousand other indicators that traditional newspapers are dying.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I'll bet there is a correlation between crime rate and frequency of rentals of Tyler Perry movies in SE DC and PG county.
Also, military bases rent a lot of kids movies and yuppie pricks in MoCo rent Milk.
I'm not sure what you can reliably take away from these statistics. Since it is only rentals it excludes the following conditions:
Did they go see it in the theater and now own the DVD? (will probably never rent)
Did they go see it in theaters and didn't care for it? (will probably never rent)
This means that the stats only capture those who
1) Didn't see it in theaters - i.e. it wasn't a big deal to see it / they didn't consider it worth the ticket price
2) Are curious enough about it to rent it later
After renting once, did they buy it for their personal library, or say 'meh' and never watch it again?
Most watched for 55450 is Battlestar Galactica season 3 and nothing else. It's the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport; on the map it's the empty grey area south of the cities. Maybe this is TSA homework?
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Checkout 80225 in Denver - small grey square east of down town above the "L" for Lakewood. It looks like just one persons queue; titles from the same series, common sense of humour, etc... Plus, according to this random page there's only one person living in that zip code. I think we have winner for this round of "thoughtless privacy invasion".
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
its information in aggregate. privacy implies PERSONALLY identifying information
if i say "wilbur cross of madison wisconsin rented 'no country for old men'" then that's an invasion of privacy
if i say "323 people in madison wisconsin rented 'no country for old men'" then there is no invasion of privacy
its ok to get upset about invasion of privacy. getting upset about it when none actually occurs is some sort of spastic hysteria, a triumph of emotion over logic. save your ammo for real battles
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it