IMDB: Reducing office productivity for 15 years...

[Darren Dirt]

http://www.imdb.com/features/15thanniversary/



(started as newsgroup, but amazingly the web site itself -- same name -- was up way back in 1993)

15 years ago this week (Oct 17th, exactly) the Internet Movie Database, in essence, took shape. In those 15 years we have enjoyed the camaraderie and marveled at the efforts of hundreds of thousands of participants with the site. It is due to everyone's hard work, attention to detail, diligence, and love of movies and media that the site is what it is today. The founders and staff cannot thank those who have contributed, corrected, criticized, coerced, and (sometimes) complimented us enough. This site is a testimony to the power of this medium and the power that movies have to inspire and to create a community. Here's to our next 15 years together.

As part of our anniversary we've done a retrospective, not only of our own history, but of a brief history of film from 1990 - 2005. We've also asked our editors to add their top 15 films for the last 15 years. You can see some of the individual lists in rotation on the top right hand side of this page, and visit here for the full set. The list on the top left hand side of this page is an aggregate of that list, truly the best of the best, according to the editors at the IMDb.

...thanks to a mention by /., natch.

[Mr. Analog]

I had to drop a piece of my sparkling wit over there too...

[Darren Dirt]

Wow, you still find time to occasionally post there, eh?  :shock:



And thanks to a Slashdot poster there was a link to http://us.imdb.com/Licensing/structure.html



! Wow, I was surprised to find that the field "Genre" has a list of "Valid Values" that includes only these...



-Action

-Adventure

-Animation

-Comedy

-Crime

-Documentary

-Drama

-Family

-Fantasy

-Film-Noir

-Horror

-Musical

-Mystery

-Romance

-Sci-Fi

-Short

-Thriller

-War

-Western





Also interesting article:

"every day 400,000 people seek—or submit—information at the Internet Movie Database, how did it become the industry standard?"

[Darren Dirt]

Now with even more addictiveness!



Movie Keywords Analyzer (MoKA)

http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Keywords/

[Darren Dirt]

This week IMDB had a new change: they now have an "Episode List" instead of "Guest Appearances" for each TV show.



And I was unhappy when I first saw the change.





BUT, dang, Mr. Analog, dude, you wuz right!





Just now I wanted to see which "Voyager" episode had the character "Rain", the one with the time-travelling bad guy played by Ed Begley Jr., to see if it was Sarah Silverman playing "Rain" or not.



And hey look there is a link at the top of the new "Episode List" page:



#1. Episode List

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112178/episodes



#2. Episodes Cast (link from #1)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112178/epcast



YAY! #2 is what I thought had gone "bye bye", and it made me sad cuz sometimes you don't know the actor's name, only the character, and with reruns you don't know what season/episode# it is you just watched.



So IMDB's changes to the "guest appearances" so it is now "episode list" did NOT get rid of the handy page I always used. So I guess I'll let IMDB live for another day.

[Darren Dirt]

yet ANOTHER layout change...

Now it shows IMAGES of the cast and/or scenes from the movie (TV show?) so when you see the actor's name you are less likely to go "is that the guy from that show where the thing did that thing?"

e.g.
"V" (1983)

( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085106/ )

[Mr. Analog]

Ick!

[Darren Dirt]

Ick!

Yeah, well, considering the INCREDIBLY LONG PAGE LOADS over the last few months visiting nearly anything on IMDB (thanks especially to the extra Flash ads and unwelcome popups) I'm actually glad some "extra" info is there on the main page... but then again that slows down the pageloads even more so...

And the only other "real" alternative is TVTome.com (oops I mean TV.com) which is painfully slow for its own reasons

[Mr. Analog]

Flash ads and unwelcome popups

What are those?

[Darren Dirt]

I can "kill" the Flash ads, sure, but they still *load* from the server -- as do the attempted popups. And that's the slowness -- not in the rendering.


It's all for "payin' the bills" of course, just like the ComedyCentral.com video player, I hate it but keep coming back there for the content

Except of course most of the ComedyCentral stuff is also on YouTube and/or GoogleVideo, so ... not so much.

- - -

PS: http://www.tvtome.com/ is the old URL, http://www.tv.com/ bought it out... But the very clean http://www.epguides.com/ still exists for easy episode-name-finding etc.

[Lazybones]

adblock plus for firefox stops the images and flash files frome downloading. it also removes the blocked script from being run. this makes most ad filled sites load far quicker than usual

[Darren Dirt]

AdBlock Plus... Never heard of it -- but I presume you mean this?


http://adblockplus.org/en/faq
http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_project

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865/



I'll have to try it at home... Thanks.



- - -

PS: Cool, on the extensions page with AdBlockPlus there was a mention of "JSView" -- apparently it allows you to one-click "view-source" external JS files, which I do manually (i.e. save locally, then view) all the time

[Lazybones]

I was using regular abblock work a while but Adblock plus has more features and is updated more often...

Using it with the default subscription is good, but using it with Filterset.G works even better.. I rarely have to add my own filter, and it is fairly easy to turn the whole thing on and off on pages that have something blocked that you wanted to see.

There are some sites and forums I view often that I would never have even spent a minute on, if I had seen them first with all of their ads in tact

[Darren Dirt]

Ugh.

Redesign this month.

UGH.


but GNE!

Temporarily you can revert back to the OLD design (hooray!)
http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?redesignolddesign
http://www.imdb.com/register/siteprefs

from the "Redesign FAQ"

[Mr. Analog]

Thanks, I REALLY HATE HATE HATE the new design.