Thursday, 30 May 2013

Rotten Tomatoes: Best Movie Review site

For many years now, Rotten Tomatoes remained to be the leading edge of top movie reviews and competent movie critics.

What is Rotten Tomato?

The main purpose of Rotten Tomatoes is simple and obvious. It provides a venue for people to read movie reviews before they watch a certain movie. On top of the homepage, a banner showing a box of popcorn plus a red tomato, calls to download the latest application and “stop watching bad movies.” Rotten Tomatoes also lives up to its name, which was coined from the common cliché of people throwing rotten vegetables or tomatoes to stage performances that have poor quality. Rotten Tomatoes helps people choose a good movie before paying out their money to watch any movie.

User Friendly Platform

Gaining access to a treasure of entertainment and information at Rotten Tomatoes is easy. When you are logged in into your Facebook account, you are automatically logged in into Rotten Tomatoes. The site’s Homepage is already forefront of what every person is looking for. On the left corner, displayed is the list of movies according to what is the top box office, opening, and coming soon. Below it, you’ll find top rentals, new DVD releases which automatically give you an idea of what to watch.  The site also features top headlines, movie news, movie trailers, and recommendations. The “What’s hot on RT” section also gives movie updates of the latest movie events and updates of popular actors and actresses.

Easy-to-spot Movie Ratings

What is good about Rotten Tomatoes is that you do not have to read a scholarly critic about a certain movie. Clicking on a particular movie will automatically lead you to its review page. On the top of the page, you will see the “tomatometer” showing an up-to-date rating of the movie.  Beside it is another percentage rating showing how many people like the movie, through Flixster. For instance, a movie with 25% rating in the tomatometer and 10% rating in Flixster is poor. This rating also appears beside every movie title in the homepage, so it is easy to spot. At a glance, you would know if that movie is poor or good.

Rotten tomato does not only give you access to a plethora of movie reviews but also allows you to share your own critic through the message bar. It also gives the basic information about the movie, such as the running time, directors and cast, release date, and ratings. As you scroll down the page, you can have a sneak-peak of hundreds of movie critics coming from the different people around the world. If you do not agree to one of them, you can hit on the comment button and share your opinion.

Rotten Tomatoes is not only informative but is also highly entertaining. Unlike other movie review sites, Rotten Tomatoes allows you to engage in fun challenging conversations with other movie critics. You van visit the site for great movies ratings, rottentomatoes.com/ the site at This entry was posted in Microblogging, Movies,Musical and News.


Source: http://commonection.com/rotten-tomatoes-best-movie-review-site/

Monday, 27 May 2013

Rottentomatoes Scraper

This is outside the scope of this blog but I want this to be available to the public. I have been working with another developer to create a php script that scrapes Rottentomatoes for information via the API. This is free to use, redistribute and modify. The source code can be downloaded here: http://www.trentflix.com/downloads/tomatoscraper.zip  You can also test it out here:  http://www.trentflix.com/tomatoscraper  but it is limited to 50 titles/ IMDB id's. It will export certain information to a .csv file for use with excel or to import into a database.

Thanks to renancarmo for helping author this script and to  Abhinay Rathore  for developing a similar project and making it free.

I wanted this done to help with my statistical analysis, I am also working on a script that scrapes IMDB and Metacritic but that requires the use of Extreme Movie Manager . I might go into how I organize and keep track of my 3,000+ movies and 200+ TV Series collection at some point. It is quite the task to keep all the information accurate, up to date and readily available to view on any/every device.


Source: http://trentflix.com/archives/576

Friday, 24 May 2013

Grabbing rotten tomatoes ratings via their API

Basically, given a list of movie names and the years they were released at the movies, we can query the rotton tomatoes api in order to extract the critics and audiences ratings. One of the problems is when a movie title of ‘untitled’ is used, even in conjunction with 2009 when it was release, many more movies are returned by the api such as ‘untitled star trek sequel’ without a year. So, when you extract the data from a list object, you need to be careful in finding just which list object within the list of lists (argh!) relates to the movie in question and then extract subcomponents from there.

R can be used for data scraping and munging, but it is very frustrating to a junior R person like myself, especially when I know that various ETL tools offer a much simpler solution to this issue. PErhaps it is about time I picked up an open source ETL tool so that I can alleviate some of my R frustrations. After all, my interest is in data mining with R, not extract and munge with R… but, they do say that data preparation is 80% of the effort.

Need to workout how to keep indentation in code snippets on wordpress.


# SET YOUR FREE NY TIMES MOVIE API KEY HERE
my.key <- 'sign up for your key at the developer website of rotten tomatoes'

# lod the required packages
library(RJSONIO)
library(RCurl)
require(stringr)
require(plyr)

# extract the data
extract_details <- function(doc, movie, year){
# this function needs to handle when it finds multiple movies....
cat(movie,' - ',year,' - ',length(doc[[2]]),' matches\n',sep='')
index <- 0
if(length(doc[[2]]) == 0){
dtls <- data.frame(title = movie,
year = year,
critics_rating = NA,
critics_score = NA,
audience_rating = NA,
audience_score = NA,
stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
}else{
for(i in 1:length(doc[[2]])){
if(doc[[2]][[i]][2] == movie){
index <- i
}
if(index != 0){
dtls <- data.frame(title = doc[[2]][[index]][2],
year = doc[[2]][[index]][3],
critics_rating = doc[[2]][[index]][[8]][1],
critics_score = doc[[2]][[index]][[8]][2],
audience_rating = doc[[2]][[index]][[8]][3],
audience_score = doc[[2]][[index]][[8]][4],
stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

} else {
dtls <- data.frame(title = movie,
year = year,
critics_rating = NA,
critics_score = NA,
audience_rating = NA,
audience_score = NA,
stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
}
}

}
return(dtls)
}

# grabs the movie metadata from the API and then the review from the web page
grab_rotten_data <-function(movie){
options(warn=-1)
# 1: replace spaces with +
movie.plus <- str_replace_all(movie[1],' ','+')
# create a bad result if we have a scrape error
bad.scrape <- data.frame(title = movie[1],
year = movie[2],
critics_rating = NA,
critics_score = NA,
audience_rating = NA,
audience_score = NA,
stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
df <- bad.scrape # give it a default fist

# 2: Build URL
rottoms.url <- paste('http://api.rottentomatoes.com/api/public/v1.0/movies.jsonq=&#039;,movie.plus,'&year=',movie[2],'&apikey=',my.key,sep='')

rottoms.out <-getURLContent(rottoms.url,curl=getCurlHandle()) # this is the data
doc <- fromJSON(rottoms.out) # return a list structure of the movies that match the title
df <- extract_details(doc, movie[1],movie[2]) # extract the details I need
if(nrow(df) == 0){ # if the exact movie was not returned, then return a bad scrape
df <- bad.scrape
}
options(warn=1)
return(df)
}

###--- Main ---###

# Step 1: Read in the movie names
movie.file <- read.csv("NamesAndYears.csv")

# Step 2: Grab only the movie names and set to character, and get the YEAR from the date
movie.names <- matrix(NA, nrow=nrow(movie.file),ncol=2)
movie.names[,1] <- as.character(movie.file[,1])
movie.names[,2] <- as.numeric(format(as.Date(movie.file[,7],'1970-01-01'),'%Y'))

# Step 3: Grab all the data ! - NOT DOING THE RIGHT APPLY CALL HERE?
movie.names <- as.data.frame(movie.names, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
rotten.df <- do.call("rbind", apply(movie.names, 1, grab_rotten_data))
# Step 4: write to file
write.csv(rotten.df ,file="RottenRatings.csv", row.names=FALSE)


Source: http://binalytics.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/grabbing-rotten-tomatoes-ratings-via-their-api/

Thursday, 16 May 2013

Lessons Learned: Patrick Lee Throws Some Rotten Tomatoes At Your Startup

On October 24th as a part of the CoCoon Entrepreneurial Series, CoCoon hosted Patrick Lee to speak about his experiences with Rotten Tomatoes.

Rotten Tomatoes is a leading entertainment website that rates movies before they are released to the public. The site uses 400 critic reviews to get the average critic rating. A movie with 60% rating and above would be considered a fresh movie, while a movie with below 60% would be considered rotten. A good movie would receive a tomato, while a poor movie would receive a green asterisk that was supposed to symbolize the effects of a thrown rotten tomato. Rotten Tomatoes also offers entertainment news and a searchable movie database.

Patrick discussed the beginnings and the trials and tribulations that Rotten Tomatoes navigated. Rotten Tomatoes survived both the first dot com crash of 2001 and also the after effects of 9/11. Also, Patrick discussed the growth period and revenue paths that Rotten Tomatoes tool.

The most important ideas to take away from the talk came after Patrick’s talk. Patrick has a few word of wisdom for budding entrepreneurs.

Do not double down.

If you’re putting all your time in, then don’t put in your money. If you do both, you’re doubling your risk. Try to raise that money from someone else and if you can’t find the funding then maybe it’s just not a good idea.

Start businesses with your friends

Most startups fail because the founders don’t get along. Don’t let your business fail because of a horrible fight. Businesses should fail from legitimate reasons, not because the founders couldn’t stand each other.

A founding team is key.

You should have a least one good engineer. Someone should be technical and it should be someone you know and trust.

Go home.

Do something where your network is, where your strengths are and where you understand the culture. Even though Patrick is Chinese and speaks the language, he had a hard time building a network and working out the cultural differences. If you have to do something in Hong Kong, Patrick recommended that you play on Hong Kong’s strengths and proximity to China. Remember the Hong Kong market is relatively small in the big picture.

Source: http://www.startupshk.com/lessons-learned-patrick-lee-throws-some-rotten-tomatoes-at-your-startup/

Monday, 6 May 2013

!!!! Data Extraction Services Best Information

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Source: http://getofbuy.com/data-extraction-services-best-information/

Thursday, 2 May 2013

Managing Online Data by PHP Web Scraping

PHP web scraping is the alternative way of gathering business study and research. Therefore, when you need online or website information, you should download this data from any online sources you have found and parse them manually on a separate work space. As a result, this would be the basic concept of web scraping without the additional overhead, which you are. By the use of PHP web scraping, business will get all the desirable content of their online website with the effectiveness and efficient.

How does this work?

PHP web scraping saves time for extracting important online information because this can extract online information faster than any other web scraping in a matter minute or so depending on its quality. It also saves manual work, which always reduces labor costs. The manual extraction of online data from the website page-by-page could usually takes years if you just do not know how. It would take a long period to extract all the online information you need, especially if the website has many pages and content. It will save you because a PHP script can automate this process instead of doing manual labor and use many overheads just to extracts information from the website.

Do you need tools for PHP web scraping?

As you know, there are different tool available for download, especially the Python frameworks. This platform let the user extract online files and information without much problems or hassles. Businesses that feel they can avoid the cost of hiring real programmers are in for the shock. It is because hiring expert and knowledgeable team is much more cost-effective than relying in no name software and framework that has little support. All businesses that want to extract online information from their different or several websites will usually hire a programmer for creating them the web scraping PHP tool.

By this way, your business or organization will have many benefits because the data criteria and system interface will be simple, easy, and specific to their tasks. Once, everything set and installed, especially the Python Framework and software it can extract automatically the required online information from your different websites without too much maintenance. Since, this web scraping has the protective mechanisms for blocking illegal scrapers that intent to capture your website’s important data, so you are rest assured that your websites are safe and secure from illegal scraper.

What is the advantage of scraping?

One basic advantage of scraping some websites is having the edge of finding the demand necessary for online data and information without dealing with illegal scraper. Your websites have the highest protection and will tend to block IP addresses that are attempting to extract data from your websites, so if you search for the post finding it would be easy without spending too much time for searching it manually.

The next advantage will let your check deals and promotions for improving your competitive standing and position. Using this tool could help you find and compare your competitor’s pricing items. You can easily tell your client and customer once your competitors offer new discounted rates, incentives, and promos that would attract potential buyers. As a result, using the PHP web scraping always makes a difference!

Source: http://www.sfd06.org/managing-online-data-by-php-web-scraping/

Note:

Delta Ray is experienced web scraping consultant and writes articles on web data scraping, website data scraping, web scraping services, data scraping services, website scraping, eBay product scraping, Forms Data Entry etc.