couldn't happen to a nicer site

There are very few big ideas that I could claim to having on my own, regardless of who ultimately got credit for it. I suppose if anyone starts selling a Diet Coke-flavored Pizza I'll have grounds for suit, but the closest I've come otherwise would be Metacritic.

Some movie reviewers offer consistently skewed perspectives. Or more accurately, their ratings are predictably high or low for certain types of movies. If you took a reviewer's entire catalogue, it would be easy to account for the persistent biases in their ratings; you could ratchet scores up or down based on positive / negative leanings, or go even deeper and adjust based on things like movie type, foreign origination, MPAA rating, or the presence of Brendan Frazier. Ultimately, you could create standardized movie ratings that give a "true" critical read across reviewers.

The main hurdle is that many top reviewers do not provide quantified ratings, which means you either exclude those reviewers from consideration, or come up with a process of assigning ratings based on their qualitative review. Hassle > payoff, so I tanked the idea.

Oh, that and I found out that Metacritic already does most of the work. They don't correct for biases or any such nonsense, but they did the tough part of quantifying the top reviewers, which really solves the bias issue because it comes out in the wash if you can consistently average across 25 national reviews. Despite my crushing disappointment and rampant jealousy, Metacritic has become one of my favorite sites.

More recently, they've expanded into ratings for music, games, and books using the same methodology. It's really a handy resource to get a quick read on the critical gestalt for any of those media. The site has apparently been rewarded for its insight and persistent, getting purchased by C|Net. Since I also read C|Net regularly, I suppose this is a good thing. Both sites offer consistently good content, although I'm not sure I see an obvious fit between them. I just hope that the "big money" of C|Net doesn't tarnish the pure heart of Metacritic.

Now if only we could get Paul Tatara in on the deal, things would be perfect.