These nanogenres are generated by Nanocrowd's analysis of thousands of movie reviews and commentary from many different data sources. In fact, the three words in each nanogenre are chosen directly from the review data. We liked how easy it was to get in to this application, and its addictive ability to keep us clicking on movie after movie, creating new lists and discovering new movies. In fact, the last movie site that had us so distracted was the Internet Movie Database.

Of course, we couldn't end this post without mentioning some of Nanocrowd's competitors, applications like Clerk Dogs (Ars Technica review), Jinni (another Ars Technica review) and the big players, Amazon and IMDB (yes, they have a recommendation engine too!)

Each of these has some merits. For example, Clerk Dogs will recommend movies based on your movie suggestion in only one step. And they also have some really cool graphs showing match criteria. Jinni requires you to create a login before you can get started, but then you can search for just about anything, such as a genre, plot, mood, or actor name.

How does Nanocrowd stack up against the other guys?  Time will tell, and the site is still being actively developed (in fact logging in to save movie lists isn't supported quite yet), but so far, we like that we can dive in and have a list to take with us to Blockbuster (they have a recommendation engine too, by the way) in five minutes or less.

I discovered today a site called WriteTheWeb, which is "a community news site dedicated to encouraging the development of the read/write web". Like me they believe the Read/Write Web "doesn't just mean writing words, it means any time the web experience becomes two-way." This is an important point, because a lot of people have no desire to publish writing on the web. I'm only interested in it because I enjoy reading and writing, and I love web technology - so writing to the web is the best of both worlds for me! But the Read/Write Web is also about interacting with websites and applications. It's a two-way communication where information and transactions are personalized, or at least able to be customized.

In 2001 Dave Winer built a website called The Two Way Web, which articulates a vision of publishing where the "content and the editing environment (are) totally integrated". My vision of the "Read/Write Web" is similar, but I like the read/write metaphor for a couple of reasons. Firstly I like to read books and I enjoy the art of writing. The other reason is that read/write as applied to the computer industry tradionally means "capable of being displayed (read) and modified (written to)". For example a floppy disk drive. So the term "read/write" cuts across both computing and journalism/literature.

In the early 90's Tim Berners-Lee envisaged an editable browser that would not only allow people to surf the web, but to modify it. First Mosiac, then Netscape, then Microsoft all produced web browsers that accomplished the browsing part - but did not allow editing. The browser manufacturers also made it difficult for people to publish to the web because each browser had its own web standards, which were incompatible with each other.

If a non-technical person wanted to publish to the web in the 90's, they had to use a separate tool to the browser - such as Microsoft Frontpage. Then there was a technical learning curve to overcome. OK so HTML isn't hard to learn, but throw in curveballs such as conflicting browsers, quirky webpage creation tools (Frontpage webbots anyone?) and competing usability ideologies being preached by the likes of Jakob Nielson and David Siegel. You begin to see that "writing" to the web wasn't as easy as it could have been, and certainly fell short of what Tim Berners-Lee envisaged.

It has only been in the past couple of years, with the advent of weblogs, that an easy method of publishing to the web has become available. Products like Radio Userland, Movable Type and Blogger help people set up a web presence by giving them templates to enter their content into and a simple "point and click" method of publishing it. With weblogs, ordinary people now have the opportunity to contribute their thoughts and opinions to the World Wide Web, in conjuntion with browsing the web. We are approaching a read/write web.

The Read/Write Web isn't just about being able to publish writing though, it is also about an increased ability for ordinary people to interact and transact with websites. For example most corporate websites used to be brochureware sites. Information the company presented on their website was one-dimensional and similar to a printed brochure. In the past few years, company websites have evolved so that users can interact with the site and (the next step up) transact with it. For example, on my telephone company's website I can now view the details of my telephone bill and request a new phone line via an online form. This is another example of being able to "write" to the web - my online relationship with my phone company is two-way.

The Read-Write Web is being enhanced by new XML technologies such as RSS. I can subscribe to various RSS "feeds" from my favourite weblogs like Dave Winer's Scripting News and Jon Udell's Radio. This is what is called "Publish/Subscribe" - Dave and Jon publish their content via an RSS feed, and I subscribe to it via a news aggregator such as Feedreader. There are many other XML technologies that promote the Read-Write Web - such as content management systems, RDF, IM, OPML. I will explore these in more detail in future articles on my weblog.

The Read/Write Web means that ordinary people can now easily publish their 2 cents to the World Wide Web. A corollary of this is increased sources of information to read on the web. Previously people got their news and information from sources such as newspapers and magazines. Now people can get their information 'straight from the horses mouth', in addition to traditional media. The Read/Write Web encourages people to broadcast their specialist knowledge so that anyone can tune into it - witness the recent popularity of lawyer and librarian weblogs.

The web is now much like the CD Writer found in most modern computer desktop packages. It can be browsed and read, plus written and recorded to. With weblogs and other XML technologies, we can easily publish information to the web and interact with other websites. The Read/Write Web is the next generation of web publishing, and we're in the middle of creating it!