Episode Guides: the Playlist Project

[Manny]

Cool idea.

[Kels♥]

Hi, sorry for the noob first-post request. It's bad netiquette, I know. The wife and I are big Simpsons fans--have the first thirteen seasons on DVD. Lately, we've been watching episodes by theme. Christmas episodes; birthday episodes; episodes where Homer starts a new business; episodes where Bart makes a crank call to Moe's; episodes where Mr. Burns doesn't recognize Homer. And so on and so forth. It's been fun to watch an episode and recognize a familiar subject: the kiRAB get a dog/pony/elephant; there's a song about the Kwik-E-Mart/cleaning your room/vests; characters visit/move to Capital City.

I'd really like to come up with thematic lists of episodes, similar to the appreciation threaRAB in that they would list episodes that feature the Bart/Millhouse relationship or the nuclear plant. My wife and I can do this in a very piecemeal way, but this seems like a great crowRABource project: put a bunch of Simpsons fans to the task, and they'd come up with lists we hadn't even thought of. Granted, some of these lists would be pretty subjective. If you want a list of episodes that feature Moe, how much do we have to see him to say that the episode "features" him? I don't know the answer, but I'm okay with that level of subjectivity. After all, it should be a fun thing, not the construction of a definitive once-for-all-time list.

These themes could be pretty easy to use to build playlists. We've got these episodes in iTunes, and I've added a few of these themes as tags to the comment field. For example, "Homie the Clown" is tagged with #TheMob. If I create a Smart Playlist that looks for all Simpsons episodes with the #TheMob tag, it will automatically put those episodes in a playlist.

While that's a local use, collaborative tagging sites (like Delicious or Diigo) let you easily tag bookmarks in a similar way. Save the bookmark to one episode's page on Wikipedia, for example, and anyone can add their own tags. If you want to find all the episodes where someone celebrates a birthday, search for the Simpsons and birthday and it could return a list--a fan-built episode guide by theme.

For example, here's a link to the Delicious link to the "Stark Raving Dad" page on Wikipedia. I created a couple tags for the episode--Birthday, DrMarvinMonroe, GuestStar, Song. I also created a unique tag, SimpsonsPlaylist, to make it easy to find this and other saved links to Wikipedia episode pages. Other users could add their own tags, and then do a search for the tags "SimpsonsPlaylist" and "Birthday" to find episodes tagged with that word.

I'd be happy to use some other tagging service besides Delicious. It's free, though it's now run by Yahoo and requires a Yahoo account to join. If anyone's interested in working on a project like this, post away, or send me a PM. Cheers