Other Media Recommendations

[TonythePony]

This site provides great movie recommendations. It is the final word on what movies I invest time in watching and the order I watch them in.

It also does an amazing job of sorting people into those to listen to and those to ignore. My curated list of Kumpels has built a huge amount of trust after almost never steering me in the wrong direction. I think it's an underutilised resource.

I thought, like a lot of other users, that I wanted TV series jammed in to Criticker. Implementing that would be messy, though. Integrating the ratings could also unbalance the site. All we really need is the recommendations, not TV ratings.

This is my roundabout way of proposing placing "Other Media" recommendations in profiles.

Ideally you'd be able to:

- recommend series, books, music, games (also allowing a short comment)
- have different recommendation gradings (e.g. highly recommended, very highly recommended)
- see who else recommended each item
- have an external link for more info (Amazon)
- see some items on the main profile with a separate tab for a full list

I realise some of that would be difficult to implement, some impractically so. I do think the effort would be worthwhile for increased traffic and Amazon click throughs.

Even if you just dumped Bio's, which are almost unused, and put in "Other Media Recommendations" it would provoke updating of profiles and help individualise profile pages.

Oh, and thanks for keeping this site running, mpowell.

[mpowell]

Thanks for the suggestions... we're actually looking right now at implementing TV series. We currently allow so many types of "films", that adding TV programs seems like a no-brainer. Why should we have 10-second shorts from 1892, but not Breaking Bad?

At first, we'll probably just be allowing the series themselves... not individual episodes. We hope to do this in a measured way, in order to avoid the imbalances you mentioned. Of course, we'll announce when this is ready.

[TonythePony]

Exciting news.

Good to hear you're starting with series alone and assessing from there. I really don't want 100 episode clumps of ratings clogging up my RSS feeds regularly.

Criticker will be valuable for non-US TV recommendations especially. Sepinwall does a good job for me with US stuff.

I'd still love some space for other recommendations, books especially, but I understand if you don't think that fits in here.