Thrudigital

idiomag, a partner company of ours, is an online music magazine. It serves articles and relevant song tracks, photos and videos about artists it believes you’ll like, based on your behaviour. Check it out here http://www.idiomag.com

The site allows you to enter your username from sites like Last.fm, Pandora, iLike, Strands or imeem and idiomag grabs your public listening profile from those sites. Those past interests are used to recommend playlists of music and videos that a user would probably like. idiomag then brings in semantically indexed articles from syndication partners about those artists, and videos and photos from around the web from events such as live concerts.

‘Your’ magazine is completely dynamic so it’s always fresh and relevant to you, and comes with some nice touches, for example the background colour and text always works well with whatever the page content (dynamic page and text colouring is, incidentally, one of the tasks thrudigital asks prospective coders to undertake http://www.thruserver.com/proveyoucanworkforus).

Recently, idiomag opened up its dynamically aggregated content to third-party developers through ‘a particularly exciting API’ (according to ReadWriteWeb). Beyond just media content, idiomag is also opening up access to user Attention Data through APML (attention profile markup language), which is the emerging open standard for Attention Metadata, and will soon offer a range of topical content coordinated to suit any user’s interests.

In essence, the API’s offering is:

• Thousands of top news articles, reviews and interviews
• Filtered videos, images and MP3s for tens of thousands of artists
• Collaborative filtering and “discovery” music recommendation based on single or multiple artists, and via profile-import from a wide variety of 3rd party sites including Last.fm, Pandora, iLike and iMeem
• A leading implementation of APML, providing access to user’s music interest profiles, for both input and output of the recommendation technology

Several partners are already using idiomag’s data through the API, including entertainment discovery platform TheFilter (URL: http://www.thefilter.com), social music community MOG (URL: http://www.mog.com), and the leading platform for University websites, Oncampus.

The idiomag API is RESTful, with API calls requiring a unique identifier key to be passed. The calls are available in a range of formats including xml, json, apml, xspf and foaf. It is really simple to understand and work with. You simply specify which format which format you need by adding /format to the end of the URL, so for example to receive the latest articles about Radiohead in RSS format, you use the following URI: http://www.idiomag.com/api/artist/articles/rss?key=<key>&artist=Radiohead. Or you could get a playlist of videos for the genre tag ‘indie’ in xspf format, by using the following: http://www.idiomag.com/api/tag/videos/xspf?key=<key>&tag=Indie. This, along with the smart implementation of APML, providing access to a user’s music interest profiles, could mean for example that you could even access your own personalised XSPF video feeds using VLC. Smart.

The documentation is extensive and really easy to understand, which should make take-up a lot faster. Mashup and API guru John Musser called the first draft of the Idiomag API “interesting, smart” and unusually thoughtful about the ways it serves up different kinds of data. We’re looking forward to seeing some really smart applications being built upon the API in the coming months, and will post up anything interesting. No doubt idiomag will at the same time be one degree ahead of the curve, as they always are, in their development of the system.