Wow… it’s been a busy few months since we last posted (we’ve been readying our next big release – more on that soon). Coming this weekend is Music Hackday (11th – 12th July 2009 @ Guardian Offices in Kings Cross, London), we’ll be hosting our APIs along with Last FM, Echo Nest, SoundCloud & Songkick. Personally, I’m excited about the midnight code session that’s going to mean a heinous Red Bull and coffee cocktail.
Sadly all the developer positions are now full, but if you’d like to come down on the Sunday and see the hack presentations in the afternoon you can still register.
If you’re coming along for the weekend or the presentations, don’t be afraid to introduce yourself to any of us Gigulate humans (Hackers – do grab a Gigulate API key). Bring on the hacking.
John
We said it would happen, today it did. Gigulate is launching Music API 1.0.
It’s our first step towards creating a truly valuable API for Music News, Music Blogs and (in the UK, for now) tour dates and concert tickets. We know it’s going to be great fun to develop with. Essentially it’s going to expose the masses of data that we aggregate every moment of the day, we’ve already built Gigulate Charts on it, so we know it’s hack magique.
If you want in, we’re going to restrict access for a bit, so you’ll need to fill out our little form and we’ll be in touch:
http://gigulate.com/api
Here in London, a bunch of us will be going to http://musichackday.org/ in a few weeks. If you don’t get hold of an API key before then, make sure you come to that so you can have unparalleled access to the biggest database of music news, blogs ever and so many tour dates you’ll be hacking faster than you can say Alan Turing (ok… Linus Torvalds).
We can’t wait to see what you might find it all useful for.
Ben
x
(Confused? What’s an API?)
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 daysThe 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 infographicHowever 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
