mypipeline

A colleague pointed me to the excellent iplayerlist a while back, and it inspired me to hack up this Channel4 CatchUpList because I find the current Catch Up interface a little over egged at the moment (don’t worry, we’re working on that).

Anyway, here it is, a list of the TV shows currently available in Catch Up, with links straight to their player and the time left to watch them. There’s also a breakdown of what genre of programming makes up the Catch Up service.

This still doesn’t work out the can’t-view-on-a-mac dilemma, which I too suffer from.

We’re working on that too…

NB: this service is cached every hour.

No Comments | In: Ideas, Projects | tags: channel4, on-demand, video. | #

Updated Aug 20 ‘08

Albumaniac: Lyrics.com + Last.fm mashup: game that pulls a random lyric or verse from the lyrics database, and four album images from the Last.fm REST service. The user has to guess which album the lyric is from. If they get it wrong, the albums disappear. If they get it right, the album art is automatically added to their knowledge base and that information is stored for later. The information could, for instance, be used to allow that user to act as an expert on that band or album, or whatever. Or it could just accumulate on that player’s profile as a ‘badge’ of their knowledge/skill, and therefore be matched against other players who share their knowledge etc.

Band-aid: Tour dates map mashup with Yahoo! Maps and Upcoming.org. Visualisation exercise for traditional calendar-based information. User searches for a particular band, and the map is populated with their tour dates and locations, with a 1-2-3-4-5 dot-connection to indicate the sequence of the tour. Then the user can form a group that campaigns to get their favourite bands to play in their hometown by pledges for ticket sales. The user could use a ticketmaster purchasing client to buy tickets for the tour. This would be even better if the unsigned bands could add their gig locations and dates to the map itself.

Twitter + 43People.com mash: user  tweets goal progress notes to their 43things.com goal list. This would then appear as a mini-blog that gradually builds a graphical progress report for all of their goals/travel spots/etc. They could set milestones as well (I’ve raised £300 of £1000 to do my Mt Kilamanjaro trip) or set themselves challenges with the new API call on 43things.

Caveat: I haven’t checked whether any of these actually exist..some probably do. It’s just a brain dump, so I can start thinking about something else.

No Comments | In: Ideas, Projects, Social Media | tags: mashups, music, open APIs. | #

Update: I’ve now created a handy filter to avoid retrieving all the spam blog sites. Hopefully it will keep most out!

This is the 3rd of a series of little tools based on the Channel4 listings service XML. Starting to get a bit more complex here, but still keeping it simple. All the tool does is take a list of yesterday’s TV shows on Channel4, takes out shows that may not be hugely controversial, and then queries the Technorati Search API against the show title, pulling out only blog entries that have more than 150 inbound links to them. The algorithm is still nascent and can’t yet account for spam sites, but I should have this cracked soon. Another two little quibbles: I’m only allowed 600 calls to the API a day (so no more for today ) and also some blog entries are returning crap characters. OK for a quick tool though I suppose.

C4 Listings Blog Buzz

Previous listings apps: Repeat-O-Meter, Category Gauge.

No Comments | In: Ideas, Projects | tags: channel4, tv listings. | #

Another mini app tonight, this time a simple read-out of the genres that are playing on Channel4 programmes at the moment. There’s nothing special about either of these apps (see machine 1, Repeat-O-Meter) but they are allowing me to do a little bit of impromptu research and play around some of the data that’s bubbling below the surface of channel4.com.

I’ve got some ideas about mashing these ideas with some other sources, but for now, it’s kind of nice to reduce my thinking to these tiny forms; it focuses me on a specific goal. Which frees up the rest of the mind to synthesize new combinations of forms. So I think I’ll work up a few more…

No Comments | In: Ideas, Projects | tags: channel4. | #

OK, fairly spurious I know, but I was having a little play around with the Channel4 listings XML and saw that part of the data tells whether a programme is an original or a repeat showing. It’s just about the least important bit of the data, which includes programme information, and genre stuff… but still it prompted an amusing hour coding this little app called the Repeat-O-Meter.

Find out which of the C4 channels is serving the freshest content:

Repeat-O-Meter

No Comments | In: Data Visualization, Projects | tags: channel4. | #