Rottentomatoes.com, for people who have opinions on movies.

The website RottenTomatoes.com has arguably become the Internet’s best way to decide whether a movie is good or not. Moderators pull movie reviews from newspapers from around the country and post them on the site. From there a consensus is determined as to whether a movie is Rotten (bad), which means the movie received 60 percent or less negative reviews or Fresh (good), which means 75 percent or better positive reviews. There are 40 critics that are designated “top critics” because of their frequency and quality of reviews. These are the critics that appear on the front page of each movie’s page when it is searched for.

Rottentomatoes.com has really become the movie-buff’s dream site. On one site there are trailers, photos, synopsis’, interviews, and forum and of course tons of movie reviews. But the site has gone even further. It has become interactive. There is now an entire social networking aspect to the site.

It is called “The Vine.” On this FREE network (I signed up, it took 30 seconds) users are given a Journal and ability to make “friends.” There are many more forums here than in the Forum section on the site and reviews from other user’s journals. The journals are primarily used for personal reviews of particular movies. At “The Vine” there are also groups created for users how have similar tastes in movies or actors.

I was really impressed with the usability of the site and the relaxed atmosphere. It really felt like it was designed for the average movie-goer who cared about what they are about to see. “The Vine” was created for the more serious film enthusiasts who really want to find a group of like-minded individuals. RT does a great job of creating an environment that is interactive and simple.

Rottentomatoes.com recently celebrated it’s ten year anniversary and created a satirical video about how the site’s creators view the site.

Is Twitter messing with your emotions?

A recent study by neuroscientists led by Antonio Damasio from the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California believes that Twitter and other immediate response social networking tools suggest that these tools are better suited for some mental processes and worse for others.

One of the study’s authors, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, explains that for moral decision-making concerning other people more time is needed to contemplate and think through situations. Admiration and compassion take much more time for the brain to process than the split seconds it takes to recognize pain in others. The age group that was most effected by tests in the study were adolescents.

The conclusions of the study were applied to the media. Viewers are constantly having tons of information thrown at them all at once through television, online news feeds and now Twitter and Facebook. This overload of information is not allowing people, especially adolescents, to have adequate time to feel compassion or admiration for others because the next piece of information is being thrown at them before they can process the information. This, in turn effects people’s morals.

Social experiences in the real world shape morals and values. When things are happening in real time, not digital time, there is more time for reflection and morals and values are formed. In a fast-paced digital environment there is no time for reflection.

Social media is not to blame for these issues, as in most things, it is not the tool that is the problem, it is how the tool is used. If social media tools are used in moderation there will be far less skewing of emotions than those who use excessively.

XBRL: Making meaning out of financial reports

After watching the XBRL in Plain English video I realized how static finance is if users are on different platforms. What is a financial report if the numbers do not have easy to find and understand meaning? The fact that many of the world’s accounting firms use different platforms to interpret data and analyze companies scares me. How can information be shared?

With XBRL more regulation from the Securities and Exchange Committee seems to be possible. Financial reports will be more informative and give a better picture of what is actually going on with a company or industry. The more information on a company that can be traced back to actual data, and not just the numbers on financial statements, the more realistic a company’s future is. With those facts in mind, stock brokers can make accurate projections on what stocks will perform well and be able to put more value on successful companies. The rise in stock prices will increase the value of the companies. This will improve the overall economy because companies will have more working capital at their disposal. Before you know it the economy could be booming again because XBRL was used to make financial information more accessible to all.

In this time of economic depression, that is the fault of greedy financial institutions, it is so important to have transparency and facts to prove all things financial in ways that can be understood by everyday citizens. The everyday citizen is the person being effected by the economic depression, not the high-paid CEO’s who created the problem.