300

I'm so excited to see 300 in the theaters when it opens that I'm literally vibrating right now.

Don't judge me.

I consider myself a fairly educated guy. I have degrees. I read lots. I go to museums. I understand important issues and can create and articulate opinions on them.

But show me a movie with a sword fight and armies massing to chuck axes at each other, and I immediately turn into a 12 year old.

All preliminary reports of the movie seem to indicate that I'm not going to be disappointed. The two I would point to specifically are this review from Ain't it Cool News, and this interview in Wired with director Zack Snyder, who starts off the conversation by saying:

No one should ever take drugs, ever. I want to go on the record on that. But if someone was to slip you a mickey, I would immediately get into a taxi and go to an Imax screening of 300.

Nice.

I found very interesting the discussion of Snyder's decision to film everything in a studio so he could manipulate the sky, contrast and lighting to reflect the characters' emotional states. He described it as "a big mood ring."

That's one thing I believe is missing from the Web. We've made such great advances in taking advantage of targeting content for visitors based on their geography, the technology they use, the time of day they visit, etc. But in only the rarest of occasions do we ever manipulate content based on the visitors' moods. The only counterexamples I can think of are various blog sites that purport to give the mood of the author. But that doesn't really count, because that's changing the site for the author, not the reader, and the change is usually very minuscule (an icon on livejournal, for example). Another example is any number of Internet music sites that will feed music according to the mood you're in. The best visual of this that I've found to date is at musicovery. I don't think that the algorithm they created picks the most appropriate music to match the mood I select (maybe they need to purchase or get acquired by Pandora for that), but the mood widget is a nice example of what I want.

I'd love for Firefox to have an extension that allows the visitor to set a mood along any of a variety of continuums. I'd take positive (happy) to negative (sad), energetic to tired, and formal to irreverent as my first three. Then I'd want the extension to tag the visitor for that day with a quantifiable emotional state. And I'd want an open API for websites to be able to read those moods and adapt their content using whatever CMS or MVT tools they have. Would a visitor mind if a website knew his or her mood? I don't think so. To a perceptive stranger, one's mood is already publicly accessible. Plus, I think visitors might appreciate content that wasn't all bubbly if they've been having a bear of a day.

Alternatively, I wonder if one could extrapolate a visitor's mood from a playlist and present content based on that. I'd pay for it without blinking (at least for a test). That would be a unique business model for Internet radio players.

And if you could somehow inject the occasional sword fight, I'd be yours forever.

Comments

[Joseph Carrabis]

Howdy,
I swear to god I'm just getting to this because I'm finally catching up on my reading.
And you know I'm going to say that we have the technology you're looking for. No, not something that will automatically include a sword fight (well, okay. It could).
But if you're looking for something that can run as a browser extension, reads your emotional state and lets sites know, yep, we can do that. Also just have the technology running on the website itself. No need to put the overhead on your computer.
And I loved 300.