We've gotten lots of email and requests for a way to navigate and select nanogenres. This is a little tricky, and we're still not sure exactly how to do it, so we decided to share a bit of our analysis and work-in-process.
If you want to take a peek under the covers at Nanocrowd, check out our new Sandbox, where we put two sets of reaction maps (more on Reaction Mapping here).
The Sandbox is an experiment for us where we share a "play" area. We haven't hooked these pages to our main application, nor is the interface polished or finished. We'd love to hear your ideas, but please be a little tolerant (and patient) with the unfinished look and feel of the Sandbox.
In the Sandbox, at the top of the page are two search boxes. The first lets you search directly for nanogenres. Start typing characters in the search box and check out the nanogenres you can choose. Select one and hit the "map genres" button, and you'll see a map of the nanogenres that are closest to the one you chose.
For example, if you look up the nanogenre comic-book, evil, silly, you'll find other fun nanogenres that might interest you, like "hero, vision, excitement" or "villain, avenge, justice." When you find a nanogenre you like, click on the "i" icon to get a list of the movies in that nanogenre. You can jump to one of those movies and see a map of all the movies that are similar to it.
If you click on the "i" for a movie, you can see its nanogenres or get more information about the movie on our website. Of course if you're a registered user, you can add the movie straight to your Netflix queue from there!
You can also search directly in the Sandbox for movies. If you search for The Dark Knight, you'll see the map of the movies that are similar to it. These movies are placed on the map not only based on how similar they are to The Dark Knight, but also based on how similar they are to each other. This means you can look for clusters of similar movies to find movies you particularly like.
Above is the map of The Dark Knight (the image is a little small, but you can see the real map here). On the image, I highlighted two clusters of movies: in the lower right are other comic-book-hero movies, while in the left are straight-up action movies like Terminator and Die Hard. Both types of movies are similar to The Dark Knight, but you are probably in the mood for one or the other.
At the very top of the map, you'll find No Country for Old Men. This may seem like a creative match for The Dark Knight, but they hook up because of the nanogenres "sadistic, morality, bold" and "gangster, story-telling, drama." If you click on No Country for Old Men in the map, you will find (not surprisingly) that The Dark Knight is the only comic-book hero movie that is on its map!
Wander around from nanogenre to movie to nanogenre and I hope you'll not only learn a bit about our technology, but also find some movies to watch!
In the future, we'll put other ideas into our Sandbox. Tell us what you think, and be sure to let us know if you think any of these ideas should be fixed up and moved from the sandbox to our real site.
posted by Roderic March
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