Pop-culture reviews bordering on useless

Phrazit is a new Web service that provides ultra-condensed reviews of movies, TV shows, music and such—all culled from users' extremely brief input and presented in the ever-popular tag-cloud form. An example: the Phrazit cloud for The Dark Knight tells us, among other things, that the film is "amazing," "awesome," "intense," "hyped," "not as good as Wall-E," "overhyped," "overrated," "phenomenal" and "really long," and predicts that it "will beat Titanic." It's almost like I was there—and really, really confused. A couple of jokers (ha!) even offer some spoilers. Discourse isn't dead in the age of instantaneous data transmission—it just cuts to the chase, but doesn't dig very deep. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to start a Phrazit cloud for Styx. For some reason, the word "why?" immediately comes to mind.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

August 15, 2008 in Gianatasio | Permalink