I had this idea recently that I wanted to share with the world...

We all have different tastes in movies, as witnessed by the amount of crap out there that makes money. Movie critics also have very different tastes from one another. This means movie reviews have limited usefulness for most people. The movies the I would like are not necessarily the movies that a given reviewer would like. That means that I have very little idea of how much I'd like a movie until friends whose opinions I trust have seen it.

My idea is to collect the reviews from as many different critics as possible in a database. The results could be stored in some standardized format -- a scale from 1-10 or something.

A user could come along and "review" a bunch of movies on the same scale. The back-end of the web site would go off and compare the user's tastes with the reviewers for each movie that user has reviewed. The goal would be to give back the reviewer whose tastes correlate most closely with the the user.

The user could then follow that reviewer, with some assurance that their tastes match. The more reviews the user provided, the more accurate the match would be. If a user found that the reviewer's choices weren't matching theirs in the future, they could just repeat the process with the new reviews.

The same idea could, of course, be extended to reviews of restaurants, theatre, books, farm equipment, etc.

In the case of movie reviews, I notice that IMDb already has half of the problem taken care of with their My Movies and voting features. They also have the best chance of getting permission to use a lot reviews.

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