NEWSLETTER #5
March 1996
this issue edited by Jon Reeves
Welcome to issue 5 of the IMDb newsletter. The newsletter is intended to
keep database users and contributors informed of the latest developments
from the management team. Comments and suggestions are welcome and should
be directed to newsletter@imdb.com.
Sorry for the delay in producing this issue. As you'll see below,
we've been very busy these last few months. The newsletter will be on
a regular monthly schedule in the future.
See the further information section at the end of this file for more
information about The Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
Contents
by Col Needham
The main purpose of this newsletter is to announce an important change in
the way The Internet Movie Database is organized and run. As you know,
in its five-and-a-half year history, the IMDb has grown from a loosely
coupled informal project to a highly respected Internet resource that
rivals the best professional sites of any class on the web.
The success of the database has led to an ever increasing workload for
the all volunteer team who give up countless hours of their spare time on
a daily basis to keep it going. The appearance of several other movie
databases backed by commercial operations forced us to consider whether our
volunteer project could compete with the resources at their disposal.
The IMDb team and IMDb-donated hardware were both at their limits and
something had to be done to ease the situation. After several months of
debate, we decided the best solution to ensure the long term security of
the IMDb was to turn the operation into a professional venture. The team
has therefore created a company, The Internet Movie Database Ltd., to
ensure the future of the database that they and all the contributors have
worked so hard to build over the years.
The IMDb will be supported by sponsorship of various kinds; the resources
will be used to create massive improvements in the services and features
offered by the database. At the same time, the team remains committed to
our mission of providing freely accessible, up-to-date movie information
across as many systems and platforms as possible. In short, we hope
to offer a much better service than we could have ever provided under
the old system.
Please see the rest of this newsletter for more information on the changes.
Anticipating that this change in status will raise many questions, the team
has prepared an FAQ that we'd like to invite you to read.
Please contact us if you require further information.
by Jon Reeves
With the change to professional status, we are rationalizing the naming
of server machines. Instead of a scattered assortment of addresses,
all machines will be part of the imdb.com domain. The existing
servers at www.msstate.edu, www.leo.org, and www.cs.cf.ac.uk will be
phased out slowly over the next few months; the most recent data and
latest new features will be found on the imdb.com machines. You should
change any links as soon as possible.
We are still looking into the best way to serve our Australian users;
for now, the existing mirror at ballet.cit.gu.edu.au will continue to work.
The domain imdb.org was used for a short time in the transition process.
We are also available at moviedatabase.com, which is easier to remember
but harder to type. This domain is fully equivalent to imdb.com.
The easiest access point to remember is: http://www.moviedatabase.com ; this
site points to the appropriate local sites to use.
by Jon Reeves
Our first new server, us.imdb.com, was set up in just four days
to accommodate the traffic from PEOPLE Online's Oscarama site.
The machine is a Pentium 166 with a T3 (high bandwidth) connection to
the net, courtesy of the World File Project at Exec-PC in Wisconsin, USA.
It went online March 3.
At the same time, the server code backend was completely rewritten for
more efficient database lookups. The combination of a fast machine, new
fast code, and a fast network connection has greatly improved response
time over our previous machines. The new code also lets us provide
dynamic backlinks to a referring site, like the PEOPLE Oscarama site.
After just a couple weeks, the new machine is already handling over
100,000 hits a day, and it can easily handle many more.
In addition, the machine uk.imdb.com has also been put in place to handle
European traffic.
These machines would have been necessary in any case, since the servers at
Mississippi and Cardiff have become overloaded; we took the opportunity to
improve service to everyone. The code rewrite was only possible because of
the extra disk space available at our private server machines.
by Jon Reeves
Coincidentally, shortly before we went professional, our long time
primary FTP site, ftp.cathouse.org, announced that it would be going
offline. Fortunately, we had a few weeks to find an alternate site. Our
main USA FTP site is now ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/info/imdb
Remember that, even though the database has gone professional, we are
committed to keeping our data freely accessible for noncommercial use,
just as before.
by Jon Reeves and Mark Harding
Many list managers have new mailing addresses since the last newsletter.
Rather than track their "real" addresses, all list managers can (and
should) now be reached at imdb.com (or, if you prefer, moviedatabase.com)
addresses.
If you are looking for the manager of a particular list, the address
is generally ; for example, actors@imdb.com.
The list-based addresses are: actors, actresses, aka-names, aka-titles,
business, biographies, certificates, cinematographers, color, composers,
costumes, countries, crazy-credits, directors, editors, genres, goofs,
languages, laserdiscs, literature, locations, miscellaneous, movie-links,
original-titles, plots, producers, prod-companies, prod-designers,
quotes, release-dates, running-times, sound-mix, soundtracks, tag-lines,
technical, trivia, versions, writers.
Software developers can now be reached using their specific platform:
www, unix, msdos, amiga, windows; to reach all of them, or to comment
on the E-mail server software, use software@imdb.com.
The IMDb "help desk" can be reached at help@imdb.com if you're not
sure where to turn or you're having trouble using the database. If
you want basic information, mail to info@imdb.com will return an
automated response.
Our mail server addresses, as before, are movie, add, and correct;
the vote server is at votes. All these addresses, again, are now @imdb.com.
If you need to discuss business matters, the addresses to use are
sales@imdb.com and licensing@imdb.com; the Board of Directors is at
bods@imdb.com.
Finally, if you just want to tell us that we're doing a good job,
the address is feedback@imdb.com.
by Jon Reeves
The Academy Award pages are now fully comprehensive, including all awards
for all years. In addition, the pages are now pre-built instead of being
generated from the database, which avoids the former problems with movies
showing up in the wrong years (particularly for foreign language films).
Of course, all names and titles are linked to the appropriate entry in
the database (though initially some of these might not work while we
refine the database). There are several other interesting links on the
pages, and the pages will continue to be refined right up through the
awards presentations. We think you'll find the new pages to be the most
comprehensive and useful Oscar resource on the Web.
by Jon Reeves
PEOPLE Online was developing a major Oscar site and wanted extensive
background data on the nominees. Where better to look than their
web site of the year -- IMDb? When PEOPLE contacted us, we agreed
because of the great exposure it would give us, but we knew we had much
work to do. The current servers were already overloaded and the Oscar
data had a number of flaws (it was probably good enough for most people,
but it didn't meet our high standards).
In under two weeks, we upgraded our own Oscar coverage extensively,
provided all the relevant data to PEOPLE, installed a new server,
and reworked the database code -- all while we were busy creating the
new company.
by Jon Reeves
In response to user requests, a page has now been added linking to theatre
showtime sites (you can find this under the URLs menu item).
Most of the addition guides were very outdated; they have been rewritten
(just pick Guides off the menu bar).
The recent releases are now sorted
by release date.
The menu bars have been changed slightly; there's now a full index of
available features.
by Michel Hafner
To celebrate five years of IMDb last October, there was a quiz presented
to the public via the WWW and ftp interfaces. It contained a total
of 126 questions about 6 different subjects and used 88 images for
illustration. The quiz was demanding. Very few people "dared" to mail
in their solutions. And only one person performed decently enough to
win a prize: Ed Broom!
Congratulations to Ed! He's now enjoying six new soundtrack CDs he picked
from a large list.
The solutions to the quiz can be found here.
by Mark Harding
Two new biographical tags are now supported by the IMDb interfaces.
They record details of articles (AT:) or interviews (IT:) found,
primarily, in magazines, but other publications are acceptable too.
The format for both tags is the same:
IT: * "pub" (cntry), year, Vol. vol, Iss. iss, pg. pgs, auth
AT: * "pub" (cntry), year, Vol. vol, Iss. iss, pg. pgs, auth
Where:
pub - title of the publication.
cntry - country where published.
year - year of publication.
vol - volume number, if known.
iss - issue number, if known.
pgs - pages where the piece is found.
auth - author of the piece.
Examples:
NM: Kelly, Gene
AT: * "Sight and Sound" (UK), 1996, Vol. 6, Iss. 3, pg. 3, Peter Wollen
NM: Fincher, David
IT: * "Empire" (UK), 1996, Iss. 80, pg. 80-87, Mark Salisbury
The new tags are supported in the Web server additions interface
and the TEMPL NAME templates.
by Michel Hafner
In the past there was no clear distinction between composers that
composed original music for a movie and composers whose music, created
for other occasions, was simply used in a movie. Both types appeared
in the interface of the data base as "music by." This will change soon
so that there can be no doubt who was credited for original music and
who was only part of the soundtrack credits at the end of a movie. This
information was not absent until now, but it had to be deduced from the
fact that the named composer had been dead while the movie was made,
or that the composition was cited from which the music had been taken.
by Michel Hafner
The IMDb is an international film data base. Since its main focus has
been on movies from the English speaking countries, the character set used
so far was 7-bit ASCII; this is fine for English, but not for most of the
other European languages and the rest of the world. To properly display
French, German, Spanish and all other titles that don't use special
character sets (as original Japanese and Chinese titles, for example)
IMDb will soon support the ISO-LATIN-1 character set on its WWW and
mail server interfaces. Users will be able to access and view movie
data using this character set and mail in new data for use with this
character set. In addition, alternate titles from all countries with
languages using this character set will be accepted and made available
on the interfaces for language specific queries.
by Jon Reeves
Or, more specifically, to the London and Stuttgart Film Festivals.
Members of the IMDb team attended both festivals to demonstrate and
describe the database. In both cases, people who saw the database
were impressed by its coverage; the audience at Stuttgart kept the
demonstration going for two hours. Even our team members were amazed
by the database; as one put it, "you suddenly discover that someone is
mad-keen on Cuban movies and has been submitting info on them for years."
by Jon Reeves
Just a few of the (paper) publications that have reviewed us lately:
.net (UK), every issue. Sight and Sound (UK), December &
January. Courier Mail (Brisbane Australia), December. LA Times
(USA), December. Sunday Times (London), Jan 7: one of 18 sites
recommended. Premiere (US), January. The Web (UK), January.
Prinz (Germany), January. Toronto Computes! (Canada), January.
KSU Collegian (USA), February. Database (US) February/March.
Iway (USA) Iway 500 issue.
The review in "Database" was particularly detailed; the IMDb part of it
was about 1-1/2 pages (we rated "two thumbs up," the highest rating).
You can read the biggest, sloppiest wet kisses from these articles on
the quotes page.
We've also won several new awards. See the whole gallery.
PEOPLE Magazine: Best Multimedia site of the year. Home Boys
Links I Like Hall of Fame. GNN Best of the Net runner-up.
Clearinghouse Approved. Webbie. McKinley Four-Star rating
(for 5 different pages). Twoey's. Best of the Planet (2ask.com).
by Jon Reeves
The question sometimes comes up, "what makes the Internet Movie Database
special?" The first answer, of course, is our loyal users; without the
extensive feedback and additions from all of you, we couldn't be as good
as we are.
But besides that, there are many features unique to IMDb. First, we cover
all of cinema: not just the US, but the whole world. Thus, if you look up
an Italian director, you won't just find his movies released in the
US; you'll often find most of his Italian movies, too. We cover the
silent era as well as the sound era. We cover experimental films,
shorts, and documentaries. We cover made for TV movies and TV series.
We cover films still in production. Our coverage in some of these areas
is less extensive than our primary focus, theatrical movies, but the
combination of all these areas gives you a much more powerful database.
We also include thousands of links to other film resources on the web:
reviews; stills; movie clips; sound bites; other web sites, both fan
and professional -- you name it, if it's related to movies and on the web,
chances are we link to it.
We update the database weekly with information on new releases, movies
in production, and additional information on classic movies.
Our data and access tools are freely available at several FTP sites for
noncommercial use; this has allowed people to create some fun ad-hoc
services, like the "Baconizer" programs.
Finally, we have several fun sections: our trivia, goofs, quotes, and
crazy credit sections all keep the database from just being a listing of
facts. No wonder people have told us they've missed appointments because
they were looking at the database.
by Col Needham
This is a regular section giving information about the current size
and growth of the IMDb. We receive between 20,000 and 35,000 additions
every week from users all over the world.
Number of filmography entries: 926,597
Number of people covered: 300,776
Number of movies covered: 65,733
Size of the database (Mb): 74
Recent milestones:
- The writers list passed the 50,000 entry mark.
- The soundtrack list now covers over 2000 movies.
- There are now more than 10,000 certificates (ratings).
- The actors list crossed the 400,000 entry mark.
- Over 11,000 movies have plot summaries.
- Over 1000 movies have quotes.
by Jon Reeves and Col Needham
Well, the totals are in for 1995, and it's been an amazingly busy year.
The team members processed an average of 22,000 lines of additions and
corrections each week. Those additions came from 6650 different people;
the most active contributor, outside of team members, submitted almost
74,000 lines. Only about 13% of the additions came from team members;
as you can see, we couldn't do it without all of you helping! Thanks!
Incidentally, so far this year, additions are running well above last
year's average.
This is a regular section listing some enhancements we're currently
looking at. Please bear in mind that some of these may take quite
a while to come to fruition or even fail to materialize because the
original volunteer decides not to proceed.
- a new business information section for the database to store
distributors and rights holders contact details, box office
grosses and other information concerned with the business side
of the industry.
- a list giving the language(s) of the original release.
- a locally installable MS-Windows interface to the database is
under final testing for those of you who want to reduce your
phone bills!
- enhanced awards section for the database covering more
international festivals, national film institutes etc.
- general support for alternate titles in languages other than
English and the language of the original country.
- a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to
suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an
E-mail interface. Time to check you're up-to-date with your voting!
Academy Awards and Oscar are registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences.
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