…is an API for the Internet Movie Database.
Is that too much to ask?

In this age of “information freedom” that seems to be going around, it surprises me that there are still holdouts with massive datastores of information that haven’t taken the leap. Of course, a little googling around came up with a few hints that it might be in the works for IMDB, but nothing substantial. I can see how sites, especially ones that were created for the sole reason of being a datastore, would be fearful of opening up that information to every Tom, Dick, and Mary out there – where’s the value in coming to a site (driven some by ads, etc) when someone could go out and just pull the content they need elsewhere? There’s argumaents on both sides of things, but thankfully, it seems like the “open everything” crowd is working harder at their jobs. More and more sites are exposing their backends to the world, showing off their data in all of their glory, and the people love them for it. Think about the move that eBay recently made to remove the fees on their API – imagine how much more that will fuel their adoption…

But, oh well – back to the IMDB site I go. I guess if I want any content from them, I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way (just like everyone else) – now where did I put that screen-scraper…