Summize Blog

Best Football Movies

With four days to go before Super Bowl XLII we've been debating all things football: can the Pats continue their streak; who will have the best ad; who will be the next Redskins coach; nachos or chips and dip... And with yesterday's release of The Comebacks what are the best football movies? To answer this question we researched 40 films with football themes. We calculated overall opinions, most positive sentiments and wretched sentiments to whittle the list down to the 11 best football flicks.

Reviewing Reviews

If you've ever submitted a review to Summize.com, chances are I've read your review. We spot check all submissions to make sure that they were submitted for the right item and to make sure that they are actually reviews -- you'd be surprised at some of the things submitted as reviews. Since I'm the newest kid on the block this task was passed down to me. I admit I was less than thrilled at the prospect of checking reviews but it has become one of my favorite tasks.

Oscar Nominee Sentiments Summized

The nominees for the 80th Academy Awards were announced early yesterday morning and the show countdown has begun. Voting won't officially begin until ballots are mailed January 30, so there is still plenty of time for the 5,829 eligible members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to review the nominees.

Here are the sentiment leaders in 4 of the 24 categories.

Improved Item Experience

We overhauled the item experience on Summize this week for things like movies, books, gadgets and such. Here is a look at the improved experience for In Defense of Food. We've created a new overview section at the top of the page. It includes a picture of the item, the key people (author Michael Pollan), a summary of the positive vs negative opinions and additional facts.

We moved blog reviews down the page just below the overview section. The blog section features up to 10 of the most helpful reviews. We're still working out what makes a review helpful or not so feel free to click the yes or no links to give us feedback. For example here is a look at the helpful blog reviews for In Defense of Food.

We're continuing to add new features, so stay tuned.

Summizing the Golden Globes

Just because this year's Golden Globes ceremony has been canceled and replaced by an hour-long press conference that doesn't mean we can't synthesize, summarize and summize who the winners may be.

Based on all the reviews, opinions and sentiments we've gathered, here are our picks in three categories: Best Animated Feature Film, Best Motion Picture (Comedy or Musical) and Best Motion Picture (Drama).

Stars and Bars

We are often asked why we use a histogram visualization we refer to as a "snip" for ratings rather than the traditional stars or numeric scores used on most other sites. The answer is a bit more complex than "it looks cool" and thus seemed like a great topic for a post.  Star and numeric single value summaries for a product often hide valuable information. This hurts users because controversial books are often the great books, or the negative review is often the most insightful.  So today I am going to give a quick review of the history of attitude encoding, examine the issues associated with central tendency summaries (single numeric or star value) and demonstrate how a histogram allows users to better understand the review-o-sphere.