gigulate – blog

Today we at Gigulate are very excited to announce the next major Gigulate release: Personalisation.

What does this mean?

There are a bunch of new features, all focused around making the Gigulate experience work specifically for your own music tastes.

My Dashboard

Once registered on Gigulate, this is your go-to place for music news and gigs. It’s all personalised exactly for you: stick Artist names into your own Watchlist (I’ll explain that in a bit), and Gigulate will track them for you.

Everything on the dashboard is automagically filtered to be exactly what you want. No News stories or Gig recommendations about artists you don’t care about.

Watchlist

This is the place you visit to tell us what the most important artists are in your life, so Gigulate can give you a personal experience. But don’t worry: it won’t take you long to get your watchlist full of artists that you care about. Here’s why:

1. Quick Add – Stick an artist you want to hear about in the quick add box and you’re away. It’s the old fashioned way of filling up your watchlist. But if you only want to track say, 10 artists it’s perfect.
2. Site Importer – Already got a profile on another music website? Then use the Gigulate Site Importer to quickly add all your artists. At the moment we offer support for: Last.fm, Myspace, iLike, Soundcloud and Pandora. We’ll be adding support for loads of other music sites soon. So check back here (on the blog) for updates.
3. Music Scanner – Got a local music collection on a computer? This simple app allows you to quickly scan your mp3 or aac folders for artists and sync them with your watchlist.
   Find out more

Twitter alerts

For some this is an added bonus, for others, it’s going to be really useful. We’re announcing our Twitter alerts service. It takes about 30 seconds to get it working, simply follow @GigulateAlerts and get direct messages about the artists you care about, so you can be in the know about the music news you care about as soon as it breaks. And don’t worry about the size of your watchlist, you can manage it seperately, either from Gigulate.com, or directly using commands such as ADD, REMOVE and LIST through Twitter. Find out more

We really hope you like these new features, we’ve had great fun building them.

If you spot any bugs or would like to leave feedback leave a comment on this blog post or @ me on twitter: @johnmartin

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
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(Confused? What’s an API?)

A while ago at the OpenMusicMedia Meet in December, I got into a discussion about personalisation and afterwards thought it useful to knock together a blog post to capture our thoughts on the subject.

Effort versus gain

Personalisation is very important to us, but we don’t think the traditional method of input is the most effective. Traditionally to personalise a website/application you have to input data or take relevant action to get useful information out.

A key example of this is Last.fm. In order to get the most out of it there is a certain amount of time and effort you have to dedicate to creating a profile and advancing the service. In my opinion it’s one of the most integral parts of Last.fm, without it they wouldn’t have a vibrant community.

But this wouldn’t work for us. We want to minimise the amount of time that a user has to spend consciously handing value back to Gigulate and maximise the gain from the minimum they have put in.

Passive Personalisation

Passive personalisation is personalisation that takes place under the hub of the service you are using. Google have been doing it for a while on their search results. E.g. you get different results if you are logged in than if you are logged out. It’s interesting enough, but ultimately an unsatisfying method for a user to personalise a service.

It’s all well and good telling a user that just by using a service you are personalising it. But without direct and immediate results showing a user how you are bettering the experience it’s difficult for a anybody to trust in a benevolent machine.

The Balance

For us at Gigulate it’s an important balancing act that will create the best personalisation experience. We’ll allow users to use as little time and effort possible, but it’s also provide quantitative and immediate results based on your input. We’re also keen to allow advanced users to really adjust the granularity of their experience. Whether that’s by importing their Last.fm/Facebook profile into Gigulate, inputing artists manually through an ajaxy input box or taking a mix of all of those tools and building them into a robust mix.

Be all and end all

For us… personalisation is important, but it’s not the be all and end all. We want to provide the best experience for everyone and you. But our music experts believe in Editorial: make the product work for everyone and make it work for your tastes/needs as well. Over the coming months we’ll be releasing features that will help everyone get the best out of Gigulate.

A Happy New Year then. It’s cold in London.

After a season of excess, we’re all making resolutions: eat-less/eat-more drink-less/drink more, go to more concerts/go to better gigs, discover new music/rediscover old bands.

Here at Gigulate we’ve taken a quiet (read:poor) Christmas to get everything in order, we have elected to skip the hedonism and debauchery for a few weeks to start the detox early, fix up the Gigulator’s innards and make it super-reliable for the volume of juicy information it’s going to be sifting and sorting. Scouring all the world’s music news, blogs and local concert listings requires a fair old amount of power, and that’s before the Gigulator has even started to sort it meaningfully, so we knew we’d need some serious power to prevent a fail whale.

So that’s just what we’re going to promise in 2009, if you’ll bear with us for a few weeks <perhaps take this valuable time to enthuse to close friends and relatives about what the Gigulator is going to provide for you, every minute of the day <ahem>). Here’s a summary for the uninitiated:

1. The fastest meaningful snapshot of the music world with relevant, valuable concert listings in your area. So you can get up to speed on the music scene, or find gigs everybody is talking about in a few seconds.

2. An archive for every Artist and music source that matters, from across the web. What are they doing? Where are they? Where are they playing next? Who are they playing with? Who is discussing them?

3. Something you can rely on. Gigulate isn’t designed to replace your favourite music website. But it’ll always be here – churning through, ready for you to visit first in order to make subsequent visits to other places more valuable.

4. Informed and informative. Gigulate has been developed by passionate music fans, experienced journalists and industry experts to be an independent, unbiased experience built on the coolest web technology.

Oh, there’s much much more than that. We’ll be in touch soon.

Become a fan at Facebook, or drop our RSS into your favourite reader to stay up to date. We’ve a group going too, and we’re working on Twitter if you’re really keen or a bit of a Twit.  Wish us luck.

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(Lykke Li by ToastyKen used under CreativeCommons)

News. News. News. What’s that all about?

It’s how we keep in touch with our artists. All of us know that we enjoy keeping up to date with information about our favourite artists just as much as we need to discover new ones. That’s what Gigulate is all about. We’re obsessed with all kinds of music information. You’ll be able to find out what your artists have been up to, and News is just the start of it. The Gigulator’s going to start crunching up all sorts of juicy snax that will make sure you’re more informed about your artists than you’ve ever been before.

We’re putting some extra effort in to make sure everything works really smart before we let the riff-raff in. We’ve decided to invest in some super-clever technology that will give us the chance to really blow each other’s mind in 2009. Do keep us posted with things we can fix and keep up the great ideas – it won’t be long, now.

Until then, here’s five stories from the last week that we discovered first on Gigulate.

Coldplay, Chris Martin hints at imminent retirement – Contactmusic

Sheikh felt ‘betrayed’ by Michael Jackson – Yahoo Music UK

Lykke Li announces brand new American tour dates – Pitchfork

Jimi Hendrix’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell found dead – NME

Kanye West denies assaulting photographer – People

More updates from us, soon.

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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

Heck! Spend five minutes reading the news this week and you’d be forgiven for thinking the world is falling apart… Big deal!  Just make sure you’ve a few bob in your pocket to join us for launchy beers. Yep, Gigulate is so so very close to our first iteration (more of which at the weekend) that the three of us are starting to steam a bit – and the only thing that’ll cool us down is soggy weather and nice draught London beer. From a pub.

So what’s the plan? Erm, pass. All you have to do, is drop your email address in to Gigulate.com and we’ll email you with details of which central London pub we’ll be at on the evening of Thursday October 30th. All are welcome, though we’re operating a strict ‘Geeks Only’ policy on the door, which requires you to be particularly spoddy about something we love – Music, Tech, Robots, Monkeys, Um-bongo – the usual. To get in.  Do it now, we’d probably love to see you.

Oh yeah, if you drop your details in you’ll also get into the first round of invites to Gigulate proper.  Small bonus.

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(Radiohead in Barcelona by Alterna2, used under CreativeCommons)

Bit of a music industry post. We’ll generally to stick to commentary related directly to Gigulate here, I’m sure John or Duncan are planning to drops some bits in about the way it works or how the design is shaping up to give you more of an idea of how it’s coming together (we’re just days away from our first public beta) now and there’s a couple of things to tidy up – response times are an issue when we’re doing so much computation and we’ve a lot of the experience we still want to build, but it’s all built around the Gigulator and that’s running along just fine – for a six-week old. So we’ll roll it out and start collecting your thoughts on it.

Here’s Gigulate on The Guardian Tech Weekly podcast this week – do listen.

But on to other matters… (more…)

Sorry this is only the second post on here so far. We’ve been quite busy.  See, people have been saying nice things about Gigulate and we’re still building it.

There’s a lot of thinking going into how the clever little robot we’ve built works, it’s the pulsating heart of this here thing we’re doing and we’re pouring a great deal of our love and energy into it. The Gigulator is our guide through the world of music, ingesting all the juiciest Music News, Gig Listings, Blogs and general information at a rate you wouldn’t believe, crunching it up like crazy and spitting it out in a nice clean digested bolus, a bit like an owl. The Gigulator is employee #1.

So Duncan Amey has been sat on the top deck of a big red London bus for an hour every day with a notepad and paper, he won’t mind me telling you that technically, he’s The Gigulator’s father.  Duncan is one of the brightest, brainiest, nicest chaps you’ll ever meet. He has a knack expressing something very complicated in a way that everybody can understand. That said, what he’s building with Music News, Blogs and Gig listings has stretched that a bit for me – I’ve kept up so far, just.

John Martin is our chief creative brain.  I’m in no doubt that John conceives, designs, codes and pieces together whole new websites using the 80% of our brain that the rest of us haven’t yet worked out how to use.  You’ll find his charming personality and razor wit sprinkled through every visual message, chart and page on Gigulate – John surprises and excites people with what is possible.  That’s what he’ll shortly be doing for you.

So there’s three of us (including me), and now our little Gigulator. There’s still a ton of work to do, but we’re almost ready to show you the first bit. If you haven’t already, drop your details in at http://gigulate.com and we’ll be in touch soon. Promise.

Ben Perreau

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