IMDb Profile

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is one off the sites that I visit the most. It has pride of place on my browser's tool bar, along with Blogger and my web email log-ins. It has been the source of much of the trivia that I spout at various social occasions, and allows me to make interesting comments about films while waiting in line at the cinema. The LA Weekly has a fascinating profile of the site, "Do You IMDB?", that answers many questions, like exactly how they manage to be so comprehensive:

But how does IMDB work? It’s easy to imagine some airplane hangar in a dusty, out-of-the-way desert location, and inside is a sea of desktop computers manned by 20-something Oompa Loompas in T-shirts, jeans and Converse. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. “We’re not something out of Brazil with row upon row of automatons. We’re officially a kind of virtual business located in cyberspace,” [managing editor Keith] Simanton explains.

“It’s a lot of people really spread out across the world. We have a good portion of the editors in the United Kingdom, and most of the editorial business and sales staff are out of Seattle. We have folks in Switzerland and Germany. We’ve got a person in the Midwest who does our soundtracks. It’s an aggregate, essentially.”

They also rely on contributions from its users: I am particularly proud of being responsible for a piece of trivia on the Se7en page (the second item under the spoiler warning, if you want to check), and for being responsible for the removal of an error on the F. Scott Fitzegerald bio page (which formerly claimed that The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald's first novel, when it was actually his third).