November 29, 2009

Segment Ratings

After suggestions from @kokuun and @chikorita157, segment ratings were considered and the schema was modified to allow such ratings. Today, a hook was added to the microblog which checks for rating text within an update on a segment.

Microblog Parse

In order to make a rating through the microblog, the update must include ‘rating:’ (case-insensitive) followed by a rating. The format for segment rating varies, but the rules are basic.

Rating Format

First, it should be addressed that segment ratings are normalized to a 100-tier system, s.t. 88% = 88/100, 8.8/10 = 88/100, etc. The numbers which are used in the rating do have effects, especially when the /Max is not included.

When /Max is included:
The rating is calculated as Value/Max and normalized to Max=100. If rating 8/10, this will equate to 80/100.

When /Max is not included:
If the Value is less-than or equal-to 10, the base is considered to be Max=10, then normalized. If the Value is greater than 10, the base is considered to be Max=100.

Unless your Max is always out of 10 or 100, it is best to use the /Max for accurate ratings.

Valid Rating Examples:
6/12 = 50/100
5/15 = 33/100
18/20 = 90/100
47/50 = 94/100

8.1/10 = 81/100
3.51/10 = 35/100

Note: If a decimal results, the value is floored.

What is a segment? A segment is a sub-section of a context, or title, such as a track to an album, an episode to a tv/anime series, or a chapter to a book/manga.

July 26, 2009

What Is Melative?

I had a chat conversation with blogger, ghostlightning, discussing melative, and one piece that stuck in my mind was this.

if you don’t mind me saying, the principal problem is that melative is competing with many services

primary value proposition being its one-stop shopness, full-service

I understand this, because it appears that every feature which exists on melative, is enabled for 15 major forms of entertainment*, thus competing with the music sites, the book sites, the movie sites, anime, manga, whatever.

This is the wrong focus. Melative, as a whole serves only a few purposes:

  • express and catalog experiences on entertainment works
  • semi-semantically index meta information on entertainment works
  • do it socially [on entertainment works]

The problem is, users go to 5-6 different sites to accomplish the same task; log an experience, note about it, rate it, tag it, and find other works to experience. All the while, melative can and does exactly this, in new and conceptual ways; we’re always thinking of new ways to interact with entertainment media.

The real question/problem is, are users compelled to separate their experiences between mediums? It is rather questionable because, experience is not bound to medium. Once an experience has become part of the viewer/reader/listener, do we honestly contemplate it as a seprate ‘kind’ of experience? Is there any need to do so?

A great album. A great book. A great film. A great manga. A great opera. A great …

Experience is Boundless

Melative is about the Experience.

Notes

*Is this arguably not a benefit?
Entertainment works, should generally not include ‘Events’, but as with entertainment, arts and events, such as competition or live experiences, still provide an experience.

August 27, 2008

Meta Fields and Wiki-tags

Previously, the way meta data was saved on melative was using bbcode (described near the bottom of this post). This was a good solution as it is similar to ml tags and can be easily transformed to xml for filtering (usually just replace [] with <>, of course it wasn’t that simple).

After examining Wikipedia’s wikitext markup, I decided that this is an easier format to work with, for user data entry. While context is everything, here is the basic translation from bbcode to wiki-like markup on melative (I’ll call it double-braced, dubraced for short):

bbcoded: [artist]Love Is All[note]Original music[/note][/artist]
dubraced: [[artist|Love Is All|Original music]]

bbcoded: [character]Tyler Durden[actor]Brad Pitt[/actor][note]multi[/note][/character]
dubraced: [[character|Tyler Durden|Brad Pitt|multi]]

bbcoded: [character]Nogizaka Haruka[note]?????[/note][/character]
dubraced: [[character|Nogizaka Haruka||?????]] (notice double v.bar)

bbcoded: [artist]D[di:][/artist]
dubraced: [[artist|D[di:]]] (notice triple bracket)

The context of what each partition ‘|’ represents differs slightly depending on the containing field (ie. Production, Characters, Standards). While the limit of partitions and meaning has not been decided, 2-3 will be the maximum. Here are the current specs on meta fields:

Base, Production, Standards
[[tag|data|note]]
Characters
[[tag|character_name|actor_name|note]]

Looking at the context for Characters, the tag partition is redundant and should be [[character_name|actor_name|note]], because all tags within the Characters field will be ‘character’.

On another note, this has been implemented, and the variations have been translated from the bbcode format to this format. They are now stored as serialized arrays, rather than the bbcode text. Of course this does take more space, but for the sake of editing ease.

August 4, 2008

Production ENUM

In order to generalize media, I have grouped certain attributes. Artists, directors, producers are simply known as “creators”, regardless if the entity is a person or company. These are part of production to any media (creators), but production may include non-entity information such as medium, form, dates, and countries. Here is where we generalize.

There are many different titles for these creators; for example “Sound Director” is a “director.” While it would be great to specify the type of director, it is only relevant for cinema, television, animation and possibly music. In order to spread creators over all media, here is the list of acceptable production attributes (including non-creators bolded):

  • Artist
  • Animation
  • Art
  • Assistant
  • Author
  • Background
  • Broadcaster
  • Characters
  • Cinematography
  • Color
  • Composition
  • Country
  • Creator
  • Date
  • Director
  • Editor
  • Effects
  • Form
  • Illustrator
  • Journalist
  • Label
  • Language
  • Locale
  • Mangaka
  • Medium
  • Music
  • Period
  • Photography
  • Planning
  • Producer
  • Production
  • Publisher
  • Rating
  • Screenplay
  • Screenwriter
  • Season
  • Serialization
  • Sound
  • Story
  • Studio
  • Theme
  • Type
  • Writer

This is a working list, as I have only thought about it for a short time. I was aiming to expand the list with more complications into something like this (sample taken from a page on ANN):

  • 2nd Key Animation
  • Animation
  • Animation Check
  • Animation director
  • Animation Production
  • Art
  • Art director
  • Background
  • Background Animation
  • Background Director
  • Background Production
  • Background Scanning
  • Broadcaster
  • CGI
  • Character Design
  • Color Check
  • Color design
  • Color Inspection
  • Color setting
  • Director
  • Director of Photography
  • Editing
  • Episode Director
  • Film Director
  • Finish Animation
  • Finishing
  • Key Animation
  • Music
  • Music producer
  • Music Production
  • Original creator
  • Photography
  • Planning Manager
  • Production
  • Production Advancement
  • Production Coordination
  • Publicity
  • Recording Director Assistant
  • Recording Studio
  • Script
  • Series Composition
  • Sound Effects
  • Sound Production
  • Special Effects
  • Storyboard
  • Technical director
  • Theme Song Arrangement
  • Theme Song Composition
  • Theme Song Lyrics
  • Theme Song Performance
  • Video Editing

Should melative incorporate all of these specific titles? I am not sure, because they are not applicable to every media, and slightly redundant. If melative was centered around motion media, this would be a sure thing, but for now it is questionable.

I should also mention, that the production ENUM is for bbcodes, and within the bbcodes [note][/note] may be used openly; ie [director]Kurosawa[note]12th film[/note][/director]. So there is some flexibility

April 2, 2008

melative :: Making Media Relative

Media is already relative, so this title is slightly inaccurate. melative :: Making Media Relativity Social, would serve a better purpose. In any case, this will be the one post on media types considered “sectional” on melative. Here is the working list (alphabetically):

  • Anime - Japanese pop-culture symbol for many years globally
  • Artistry – art of the hand, covering 30-40 medium types
  • Asian Drama - very much like soaps
  • Blog – including, text, audio (podcasts), and video(vlog) formats
  • Cinema - movies, film, shorts and all things on screen
  • Comics + GN – comics, and graphic novels, non-Japanese
  • Light Novel – Japanese for of entertainment reading, similar to manga
  • Literature – classical and contemporary, covering novels, short stories, and more
  • Manga – Japanese graphic novels
  • Music – albums
  • Periodical – newspapers, magazines, etc
  • Poetry – songs, sonnets, and other forms (separate from literature)
  • Television – standard series and shows
  • Video Game

There will probably be other forms brought to attention down the road, but for now this is decent coverage. Questions or suggestions can be directed to the comment section, or e-mailed to suggest@melative.com.

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