I really want a good movie recommender system. (Which I suppose makes this a good idea to work on.) However, focusing on these sorts of issues seems like exactly the wrong way to go about it.
I understand that people overwhelmingly tend towards the extremes of rating scales. But who cares? There's so much noise anyway.
Here's what I want: (1) include (all) films and television series and (2) include top 1000 lists for as many niche categories as possible (foreign films about relationships, teen comedy, and so on).
I don't even care if it is personalized, because the personalization is always horrible. (I've tried Netflix, Jinni and others and they're all terrible.) Just having the average for the movie is actually amazingly accurate on many measures (within 10--20%).
Is there something like this? The closest I've gotten so far is finding a good IMDB user list or two.
While not exactly what you're looking for, I find myself going back to http://nanocrowd.com quite often for movie recommendations.
They don't do TV shows, but their niche categories are usually pretty solid.
It works well if you can give them an example of the type of movie you feel like watching. For instance, I wanted to watch a cheesy, nerdy, thriller earlier tonight, something along the lines of Hackers and it suggested The Net, Antitrust, TRON, Live Free or Die Hard, The Matrix, Swordfish, etc. Exactly what I was in the mood for.
edit: I just noticed that you already know jinni. sorry.
I use jinni.com - it is basically last.fm for movies and tv shows. The site could need a better user interface, but the movies are very well tagged, which enables you to dig deep into niche categories. For example you are not only able to filter by genre (drama, comedy, etc.) which is very general, but instead there are filter options for the plot too (corruption, love, drugs, mind-bending,...).
Also their recommendation engine works quite well and gives you accurate suggestion which are not that obvious or popular.
So, while not cutting-edge, jinni.com is probably the closest to the movie discovery service i wish to exist.
I understand that people overwhelmingly tend towards the extremes of rating scales. But who cares? There's so much noise anyway.
Here's what I want: (1) include (all) films and television series and (2) include top 1000 lists for as many niche categories as possible (foreign films about relationships, teen comedy, and so on).
I don't even care if it is personalized, because the personalization is always horrible. (I've tried Netflix, Jinni and others and they're all terrible.) Just having the average for the movie is actually amazingly accurate on many measures (within 10--20%).
Is there something like this? The closest I've gotten so far is finding a good IMDB user list or two.