idiomag

Over the last year, we’ve had many requests for an API to allow partner sites and independent developers to use idiomag’s data in other applications. We have been working hard with key partners over the last few months, but as of today we are excited to open up access to everyone. Details below…

idiomag’s API provides access to the core capabilities behind idiomag’s personalized publishing platform. We have several partners already using it, including TheFilter, MOG, and Oncampus.

The main functionality is around idiomag’s aggregated content. Partners can access:

• Feeds of articles, photos, videos and images, selected by genre, artist, or idiomag username
• Tens of thousands of articles, including news, reviews, and interviews (headline & abstract)
• Filtered videos, images and mp3s for tens of thousands of artists

In addition, partners can use idiomag’s collaborative filtering and “discovery” music recommendation engine, based on single or multiple artist inputs, and via profile import from a range of sites such as Last.fm, Pandora, iLike, and imeem.

This API demonstrates a leading implementation of APML, providing access to users’ music interest profiles, for both input and output of the recommendation technology. The API will provide feeds in multiple formats, and has been designed to be as usable as possible. For example, why not access your won personalised XSPF video feeds, which can be played directly in VLC!

Have a read of the documentation and start using the API here. We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Quick update: we have just enabled full-text RSS feeds for all user magazines. This means that if you use an RSS reader, like Google Reader, then you will be able to read the full text of the articles selected just for you through that reader.

You can grab your RSS feed from your “Profile” section on idiomag.

Enjoy!

So our new splash page has gone live at idiomag. We’ve moved to a much more open approach, which allows visitors to immediately jump into reading about the most popular artists right now. The articles and artists featured on the homepage are all chosen based on idiomag’s assessment of the current hottest artists.

Enjoy

Last week we ran a survey to find out whether you would use idiomag on your mobile handset, and what suggestions and comments you have about this. It was great to get so many responses, and to hear how interested you are in mobile!

As a summary of the results…

The vast majority of people were interested in the fundamentals - getting news, reviews and recommendations based on your favourite artists. I guess that’s obvious.

It was great to hear the huge range of mobile sites/apps that you already use! Here is a wordcloud of your favourite mobile sites (graphic created using wordle).

Based on your feedback, we will certainly be focusing on providing a mobile website with speed and simplicity - to allow you fast and easy access to the latest news and reviews about the artists you love, as well recommendations.

It’s interesting to see that there is a strong Apple following at idiomag… Here is a wordcloud of the phones you use.

Given that a lot of you already use smart phones, we will work to provide flexibility so that those of you who want to, can enjoy a multimedia experience.

We are also interested in the possibilities of integrating with other services, and in the future, possibly with location-based information (such as gigs), to link idiomag into the wider mobile community. Watch this space…

Anyway, thats enough from me. Thanks again for another awesome survey response - and for your messages of support. It always makes us smile when so many of you contribute ideas and thoughts.

Just a quick update…

After the last release, we did a survey to find out what you thought. Based on that we made the following changes:

1. We have removed the article abstracts. Many people said they found them useful, but it was generally agreed that they cluttered the articles.

2. The music player now only plays music specific to each article, as many respondents found that playing music from the whole magazine was confusing. However have no fear, if you still wish to listen to the whole playlist in one go, this is available when you’re on the Dashboard

3. We have been working to solve the video errors: Youtube have introduced geographical restrictions on many music videos, which was causing errors for some of our global users. We’ve reorganised to make sure our videos are available to as many people as possible, and if it isn’t available - it will skip on to the next one!

4. We did a big clean-up of articles, and particularly the spacing within articles to help improve readability. We collect articles from so many different sources that this is a tricky problem, and we’ll be continuing to work on this.

5. We improved the balance of the personalization system, so that for people with wide music interests, your magazine doesn’t focus too much on one area.

6. We introduced a “Sharing Bar” to the article page, so with one click you can post any article to Digg, Facebook, Twitter etc, email it to your friend, or even embed it as a widget on your own page.

Hope that helps improve your idiomag experience. This is only the start, don’t worry if you’re comment wasn’t responded to in the improvements above, we’ll be sorting it soon!

Over the last week or so, we have released a whole load of improvements which have been in development for months. Most of the improvements were suggested or requested by you, and all of them were only built after a testing group of users gave them the thumbs up. I’d like to compare this release to a mullet. Smart at the front, but a real party happening at the back.

Smart at the front:

So, most obviously we have a completely new version of the interface. We’ve transformed every article into a single page spread, with funky new styling and video playlists. The cover page has also been transformed into a “dashboard” so you can get an immediate fix of the articles and videos selected just for you.

To make navigation easier, we’ve added new ways of finding content. Now, as well as idiomag choosing articles based on your taste, you can search through our complete index of articles. In addition, each article has links to external information and other related artists – so you can now explore to your heart’s content!

So we hope you agree that all makes things more usable and engaging.

Party at the back:

Although we love the sexy new interface, the real fun has happened on the back-end. With this release, we have quadrupled our content volume, to around 11,000 articles a month. This includes a whole range of great blogs, and larger partners like Rollingstone.com. So this means you should now get more of the stuff you really like.

And we haven’t just stopped at content quantity, we have (and are continuing to) implement measures to ensure content is ranked by quality, so that we can give you the best we have at any given time. To this end, we have worked hard on our article processing system, to better categorize the articles, especially ones about small independent artists.

Let us know what you think

If you would like to spread the idiomag lurve by writing a blog post or writing an article, you can find the official press release here, and screenshots and other assets here.

In case you have missed the buzz around this, Esquire are celebrating their 75th anniversary by including an E-ink cover on their October edition. It doesn’t look as incredible as you might expect, but at least the technology is nearing the point of adoption by publishing houses.

You can see a video of it here

It basically consists of a few flashing panels announcing that the “future is here”, and you can see what it looks like when taken apart at Make magazine’s blog

It looks like it’ll still be a while until e-paper will support an application like idiomag… but hey, at least we can look forward to walking into a newsagent and being visually assaulted by a array of flashing, talking, animated magazine covers. Kind of like a real life myspace profile experience. Awesome.

Although I have already posted (twice) with a few details about the survey results, I just came across wordle - a great little tool for creating “text cloud” visualisations from data. So I ran our survey response data through it, to give an idea of what the responses are.

Obviously there are a few issues like 1) separation of key phrases into single words, and 2) the inclusion of frequently-repeating words that are incidental to the meaning of the answer. But given that it took me about 5 minutes to pass the response data through wordle and get the following output - I think it rocks!

Here is a visualisation of the responses to the question “Why do you like idiomag?”

And the question “What can we do to make you come back more?”

And finally, the question “Which other music sites do you visit to get your music fix?”

Pretty cool hey!?

idiomag has been chosen as one of several top UK startups to participate in a UKTI-sponsored “Digital Mission” to NYC in September. There are some great companies going, including our friends at Huddle, and some really interesting media startups.

We will be at the Web 2.0 Expo as well as meeting lots of potential partners throughout the week. Do let us know if you are in the vicinity and would like to meet up.

As I mentioned in the last post, we recently conducted a large-scale user survey (approx 1000 respondents), and the results are proving very interesting. Here are some snippets…

idiomag users are very active on the major social networks

The vast majority of you liked the “page-turn” magazine format.

The proposed new features (search bar, related article links, video playlists etc) were very well received (and as a result they will be released shortly).

It was interesting to find that very few of you use other music news and reviews sites. What was more interesting is that amongst those that do, there are no clear favourites. With the other music site types (social networks, playlist sites, mp3 stores, etc) there were very established leaders, but the “news and reviews” audience seems fragmented across many sites.

Male respondents focused their product suggestions on performance, content volume, and technical issues, whereas female respondents requested interface improvements, better social networks features, and better quality content.

Most interestingly, the data seems to suggest that idiomag has two types of user. The majority of you value the breadth of content, and come to browse idiomag on a (usually) weekly basis to get their music fix about the artists you like and recommendations idiomag has made. And then there is also a smaller, but very active, group of you who use idiomag as a newsfeed. Instead of coming on a regular basis, you value the daily updates and only check in when there is an article about a band in which you are specifically interested. We will obviously bear these two groups in mind as we continue development.

There ya go. Hope you enjoy the new version of idiomag which will be out soonish…