gigulate – blog

(Daft Punk at Arrow Hall at the International Centre in Toronto. By Aubrey Arenas)

It was just a matter of time.

We’d been working on some of the features ready to get our first proper iteration of Gigulate for a few weeks, so we opened Gigulate up so you could find out what the fuss is about.

So here’s what’s live on this release:

1. A News and Blogs index. Where you can browse all the world’s Music News as it should be, sorted. Or as a river of all the blog posts and news, as it comes in – second-by-second.

2. A Concert index. Pick a date, pick a band – it’s that easy. All the gigs are sorted so you get the most talked about bands on the web at the top of the list. We’re adding more concerts all the time but we’re already carrying regionalised listings (let us know if we aren’t covering your area) and the chance to buy tickets as late as the day of the gig.

3. Our highly-intelligent Artists and Bands index. Who are the most talked about artists in the world? How do I find my favourite artist? Use the Artists index to browse and pick it up. The list is ordered by hype.

4. Our Charts page. John’s worked hard on this. Find out how bands and artists rank against each other, add more bands to the chart or get a Daily, Weekly or Monthly view on the most discussed bands in the world. The Gigulator produces a chart of the hottest bands in the world – regardless of the somewhat arbitrary figure of downloads / CD sales. Ignore the release, this is the chart.

5. Enhanced Algorithms. Duncan’s constantly tweaking the methodology behind the Gigulator to make sure you get the juciest stuff, fastest. We’ll continue to work on this in the background to make sure that the Gigulate experience gets better and better.

Plus, power user tips: get RSS news, so you’ll never miss a thing about your favourite band, find out how your favourite blog or news source is doing or check out whats going on at your favourite (UK – for now) venue.

Gigulate – It’s the music web, sorted.

We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.

xx

Firstly let me introduce myself. I’m John Martin, resident design monkey (or Chief Creative Officer – my official title) here at Gigulate. Firstly I would like to thank all the people that came along to our mini Gigulate Beta launch party. Thank you. We all know you really came for the free badges anyway.  I thought I’d talk about some of the visual styles of the Gigulate beta and some of the key theories behind the design.

Fig 1. News Volume in the last 7 days

The main over-arching visual of Gigulate is displaying data in the most simple and easy to use manner. Whether it’s the mini bar charts on our source pages (see Figure 1) or the simple artist graphics that display artist popularity (see Figure 2). It’s all designed to ensure that you’re getting the richest dataset in the simplest way. Don’t get me wrong, I love intricate diagrams that display complex data. Like the number of uses of Comic Sans on the internet plotted against the use of Microsoft Word as a HTML publishing platform (the correlation between these two are dangerously high).

Fig 2. Artist infographic

However for every bit of data you put in an infographic the more obfuscated the original intention becomes. It’s a very hard thing to have to pull back on some of the really exciting data that we have flying around the Gigulator and think of the most useful way of displaying that dataset. I feel we are beginning to really get our data together now. It’s become 2nd nature for me to trawl through the Gigulator logs and start seeing interesting charts that could be valuable on the site. The key is to not get too carried away, stop and consider whether a user would find that venn diagram useful.

We’ve done a lot of research on what’s the best way for people to consume the information that we are outputting on pages. We feel like we are approaching the ideal solution. It’s a happy medium between sparklines next to every artist mention and just dumping the tablature data on every page.

Right, I’ve rambled on for too long now. Cheerie-bye-balls.John