As a child of the seventies and one that has never liked blowing hard-earned money and two hours of my life on an awful movie, I was always a big fan of Siskel & Ebert’s show, At the Movies. Siskel passed on in 1999 and has since been replaced with Richard Roeper, but the two Windy City newspaper critics introduced a format of back-and-forth dual reviews that were always greater than the sum of their individual reviews in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

What made it great? Well, Gene and Roger were great critics, first and foremost. But they also had great chemistry, probing each other on their thoughts on films they loved and loathed, and challenging each other in a dynamic conversation about each films merits and failures. Of course, plenty of times they agreed, giving movies two thumbs up or two thumbs down. But sometimes the most fascinating exchanges were those where they disagreed–the friendly spats were a delight to watch.

The digital era brought an algorithmic expansion of the wisdom-of-crowds (wisdom-of-the-pair?) concept, with Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic rendering a score based on the number of reviewers giving a movie a positive or negative review. But there’s still that missing dynamic exchange that we enjoyed on TV. The closest thing I’ve seen has been Bloggingheads.tv’s diavlog, but these tend to be generally discussion-oriented, as opposed to two bloggers reviewing the same movie like Siskel and Ebert did.

With Dyalogues we plan on changing that. Stay tuned.

Note: For almost a year now, the entire corpus of Siskel & Ebert, and Ebert & Roeper, reviews have been available online. Enjoy! (Here’s their review of my favorite movie; two thumbs up!)

We’ve broadly scoped dyalogues to mean any sort of back-and-forth exchange between exactly two people.

That’s pretty broad. We know. At least at the beginning, we’re launching with two formats:

• debates
• dual reviews (two people review something together; think Siskel & Ebert, or Ebert & Roeper, I guess)

There are two other formats we’ll launch down the road:

• interviews (one user interviews another)
• multi-step advice (think Dear Abby or Ann Landers, except you can ask follow-up questions)

There are some differences in the UI for each of these formats, but primarily the formats will be grouped together, so if you’re an interview fanatic, you can read interview after interview in the same section on the site. Or if you want to read what everyone has to say about the new Blackberry Pearl, then you should be able to see all of those reviews collated in the same section of the site.

There might be other formats that we’ll test down the road, as well. But these 4 are those that are on our current roadmap.