This week as part of the Guardian Hacks SXSW project we have launched a guide to the bands playing at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin.
Since a lot of the bands playing in Texas are small and little known in the UK, we knew we wouldn’t have Guardian or Observer coverage of all of them. So, to provide something useful for our audience, we’ve taken a different approach - building automated pages by aggregating information on the artist from around the web, and mixing it with our own coverage where we have it.
On one of our SXSW artist pages, you’ll find details of where and when the artist is playing at the event, biography and play data from Last.fm, playable tracks and videos from Soundcloud and YouTube respectively, and links to find the artist’s releases on Amazon.
The pages have been developed out of some prototyping work we did last year around making automated pages based on using a MusicBrainz ID to link content together. Our developers demonstrated these pages at our hack day event, and with a little bit of love and polish from our design team, we’ve made them available on the site.
There are, of courses, risks in making “automatic” pages - and if you spot any problems with them or any inappropriate content, you can email userhelp@guardian.co.uk to report the issue.
This is our first foray into using linked open data to build automatic aggregation pages on guardian.co.uk, and it has been possible not just because of the hard work of our developers Lisa, Ivan and Matt, but also thanks to co-operation with Last.fm and Soundcloud.