Over the weekend I was chatting with some folks totally outside the web tech gravity well. While explaining more about what we do at matchmine, it was interesting to see how they approached the concept of media recommendations. Initially, they didn’t see much differentiation between various techniques, but through some examples started to see some of the nuances.
Here are some example recommendation sets that helped get them to mental escape velocity:
In case it’s not obvious, the sets were spawned from the film The Sixth Sense, each exploring various aspects of it. For example, the first set dives deeper into the “supernatural thriller” subgenre. The films in the second set are examples of “turnaround” films (i.e. surprise endings). And the third set spreads the gamut, each touching a “key element” related to The Sixth Sense (e.g. same director or cast, similar plot structure, same genre, etc.).
In the end, sets like this help illustrate the variety of similarity types available. The set that makes sense within a specific context, and is most valuable to a particular user, is what we are doing at matchmine. While this was only a Gedanken exercise, it was useful when explaining aspects of our value proposition.
Spawning a Sixth Sense
Over the weekend I was chatting with some folks totally outside the web tech gravity well. While explaining more about what we do at matchmine, it was interesting to see how they approached the concept of media recommendations. Initially, they didn’t see much differentiation between various techniques, but through some examples started to see some of the nuances.
Here are some example recommendation sets that helped get them to mental escape velocity:
In case it’s not obvious, the sets were spawned from the film The Sixth Sense, each exploring various aspects of it. For example, the first set dives deeper into the “supernatural thriller” subgenre. The films in the second set are examples of “turnaround” films (i.e. surprise endings). And the third set spreads the gamut, each touching a “key element” related to The Sixth Sense (e.g. same director or cast, similar plot structure, same genre, etc.).
In the end, sets like this help illustrate the variety of similarity types available. The set that makes sense within a specific context, and is most valuable to a particular user, is what we are doing at matchmine. While this was only a Gedanken exercise, it was useful when explaining aspects of our value proposition.