Everything we do is crowdsourced. The Most Like and Least Like lists, the Crowd Ratings, the Movie in a Nutshell, and the nanogenres all come directly from user commentary we have researched all over the web. We don't moderate it. We don't change it. We listen and learn. This is the unique power of our engine.
Sometimes people ask if they can pick their own word combinations to search for movies, or when we will let them create their own custom nanogenres. Or, they ask how we come up with the words for nanogenres and how we decide what movies are in nanogenres.
The answer to all of these questions is the same. We don't decide or choose anything. Really.
It's not that we think this is a bad idea. Phil Glockner recently posted an interesting article about Tinker, which is a service that lets you create topics from keywords you select. Cool idea, but not what we do.
The reason people find our solution unique (we are pleased by all the coverage we have gotten) is that we discover and learn from commentary instead of just indexing it. Sure we could search all the commentary for movies about baseball training camps, but we thought it was more interesting to learn from viewers that movies like Bull Durham clustered into nanogenres like "baseball, aging, grizzled", "sports, testosterone, locker", and my favorite "player, cocky, sports".
Yes, What's Eating Gilbert Grape is about someone who is developmentally disabled, but that is not what people found most interesting. Instead, they described it as being about "dysfunctional, suburban, feelings" while others liked it because it was "sentimental, honest, poignant".
We don't create or write these nanogenres -- we find them by running our algorithm and discovering what movies belong together and why. Sometimes you won't find a nanogenre that describes the particular thing you like about a movie, and that is because these aren't your nanogenres (they aren't ours, either). These are clusters of movies that we discovered by "listening" to lots of viewer commentary.
By trusting viewers and being 100% crowdsourced, Nanocrowd helps you to discover what others thought about movies and to be inspired by their ideas and find new movies.
posted by Roderic March
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