I found this really cool page on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_spin-offs
This is a whole list of all the shows that have spun off of other shows. Many people have been painstakingly editing this page to keep this accurate and in sync with their respective articles, but this is an area where Freebase really shines – once the data is in there, it’s entirely possible to render this page programmatically.
So the challenge here is a two parter – one for the TV geeks to enter as much of this data as possible, and one for some MJT hackers. Here are the details:
1) Look through this list and find at least 5 shows with spin-offs, and connect them up in freebase. Just search for their titles in the search box that’s on every freebase page. I’ve already hooked up the Happy Days chain (who knew Happy Days itself was a spin-off?)
http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f80000000001379b3
To get you started, here are a few of the more interesting “roots” of these spinoff trees.. you’ll find some real gems even if you don’t recognize the root show…
Looney Toons:
http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f8000000000062641
Sam and Friends:
http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f80000000003fccf6
Broadway Open House:
http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f800000000019716d
Cheers: http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f800000000000e101
Diff’ren Strokes:
http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f800000000005bbc2
Law & Order:
http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f800000000013b473
(and yeah, we’re fixing that ‘&’ problem!)
All in the Family:
http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f800000000012d68a
2) The MJT challenge see if you can render the equivalent of the Wikipedia page with MJT. This is a good test of MQL and MJT – how easy is it to query AND render this multi-level hierarchy? This is potentially a weak part of MQL, but I’d love to see how some creative folks approach the problem.
April 25th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
We have a winner! Well, two really. Colin (of metaweb) wrote a script that scraped the Wikipedia page and entered all the ‘right’ information into Metaweb. Will Moffat over at Hamster Soup used MJT and reproduced the page almost exactly.
Will’s page even shows when spinoffs are self-referring, exposing a bug in Colin’s scripts :)
Brilliant work guys.
Check out Will’s page here:
http://hamstersoup.wordpress.com/2007/04/24/playing-with-freebase-list-of-television-spin-offs/
June 3rd, 2007 at 5:30 am
Sorry for the OT comment, but I am trying to get some invites to Freebase. I have many A Lister and influential blogger friends, including Jason Calacanis, Doc Searls, Chris Brogan, Evan Williams, etc. who might love climbing on board Freebase.
Spock sent me 50 invites, and that’s how many I could use for Freebase, if you’ve got them.
I will invite only smart, influential, geeky types.
http://twitter.com/vaspers
http://vaspers.jaiku.com
http://www.garageband.com/artist/str8sounds
June 5th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
I’ll contact you privately… but FYI, we’re not looking to be so exclusive that you can only invite “smart, influential, geeky types”
The main reason we’re in invite-only mode is to be able to scale gracefully – to learn lessons when we have 300 users, 3000 users, 30000 users, etc… if we opened up to the world we’d likely be slammed pretty hard right out of the gate and then nobody would be happy…