Voices.com: An API for Voice Talent

John Musser, June 30th, 2008   Comments(2)

Voices.com is an online marketplace for voice-over talent, where clients looking for actors to provide narration for commercials, documentaries, video games and the like can search for that talent. Clients can listen to audio samples, post specific jobs and hear auditions for those jobs from actors who have signed up for the service. Voices.com has a global database of over 20,000 voice actors in over 100 languages.

The company has released an API for its service to allow outside developers “to build more sophisticated applications around Voices.com’s services and content.” The main thrust is for developers to offer different mechanisms for searching for voices, to make “finding the perfect voice to record a voice-over faster, easier and more accessible.” You can get details at our new Voices.com API Profile page.

The documentation examples in the developer site show REST calls, mainly POST requests, and XML-RPC responses, although SOAP is also supported. The calls allow for read access to the database tables - actors, clients, jobs, auditions, and transaction status. For write access, the API can create jobs and associated audio files, and accept an audition.

Chief Executive David Ciccarelli says that “developers.. are encouraged to profit from the resulting work. Naturally, it will become our responsibility to look for ways to solidify a partnership.”

And as another example of APIs on top of APIs: the Voices.com service uses Amazon S3 for storage and retrieval of the actor’s audio samples.

Share This

OAuth Support at SmugMug

Raymond Yee, June 27th, 2008   Comments(0)

As announced on the blog of CEO Don MacAskill, the photo-sharing site SmugMug now supports OAuth:

OAuth is an open standard for secure authentication. It allows applications and services to authenticate to SmugMug and other OAuth-enabled APIs without needed to know or store the users’ sensitive login and password information. I imagine at some point OAuth might become the *only* way to authenticate to our API, so I’d at least start playing with it now.

See the documentation of this OAuth implementation for the technical details. OAuth joins other open standards supported by SmugMug, including OpenID.

Although OAuth is a relatively new standard we’re seeing increased interest from API providers, large and small. OAuth has been covered previously on ProgrammableWeb since its launch last fall:

• OAuth Spec 1.0 = More Personal Mashups?
• OAuth Coming to All Google Data APIs
• Photobucket Releases Public API
• Yahoo Launches Fire Eagle

We have some SmugMug mashups listed including PictureSync that uses APIs from many services to let you annotate and share photos (mashup profile):

Share This

7 Million Patents via Google Patent Search API

John Musser, June 26th, 2008   Comments(0)

The new Google Patent Search API is now available and lets you search over 7 million patents via code. It is part of the AJAX Search API of content-specific Google search utilities such as video search, local search, news search and others. This API gives you access to patent information like title of the patent, snippet style description, application filing date, patent status, patent number, patent assignees, and thumbnail image URL for the patent (more details at our API profile).

The introduction to the API gives simple instructions in how to employ it in a website. Like the other Google apps of this type, it involves adding some Ajax-y Javascript to a website or blog - first loading the API, having an onLoad initialization step, and then placing the search control in your page. Here’s an example for everything Subaru. Note that the generic search returns filings anywhere that term is mentioned, which may just be an example in a use case. The advanced search allows for restricting the term to a particular field in the patent database.

Jonathan Dingman of Google Inside notes that the patent data may not be up-to-date, given a simple search with Google as the search term. We tried an advanced search that restricted it to Google as the patent assignee, and had similar results, as the most recent Google application filing was over a year old. Compare this to the Patent Office’s same search using the Patent Office’s search utility. Google will undoubtedly continue to improve the product.

The main Google Patent Search page has some fun illustrations: Candy Cane Forming Machine, Device to Cool an Infant’s Head, and you can set it up to view thumbnails, which gives a quick glimpse into the cornucopia of human invention. For you Wallace and Gromit fans, here are the results for pants, toaster, and alarm.

Share This

Google Launches Webmaster Tools API

Raymond Yee, June 25th, 2008   Comments(1)

As announced at Google Webmaster Central, Google has released a public API to automate the usage of Google Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools gives web site owners detailed statistics about their site’s “visibility on Google”. According to the announcement, the new API supports the following interactions with the Webmaster Tool:

• Managing sites: retrieving, adding, verifying, and removing websites)
• Working with Sitemaps: retrieving, adding, and removing sitemaps

To get started, check our new Webmaster Tools API profile and consult the Developer’s Guide - Google Webmaster Tools API.

While not all of the functionality of the Webmaster Tools are available from the APl, the current API will probably be of interest to webmasters who manage many websites and who update sitemaps by manual processes. And as Google notes, “this [version] is only the beginning”.

Share This

Mobile GPS App Maps Stars and Wins Money

Kevin Farnham, June 24th, 2008   Comments(0)

The winners of the Spring 2008 WHERE Developer Contest have been announced. Contestants built some very innovative applications on the WHERE API, a platform from uLocate that lets developers create GPS aware applications for mobile phones.

The grand prize winner was Skymap, an application that uses GPS information to create a map of the sky including planets and constellations at your location (1 of 6 “astronomy mashups” on PW). The grand prize winner received US $5,000, a GPS handset, an application review from the AT&T location product team, and inclusion in the WHERE catalog.

The runners up were Mapicurious, which lets you share information about points of interest with others; DigOrDis, which lets consumers rate and search for nearby restaurants and other businesses; and VoiceMap.mobi, which lets you leave voicemail messages tied to a particular location. The runners up received US $1,000 in cash, a GPS handset, and inclusion in the WHERE catalog.

The WHERE API tutorial is a good place to start if you’re interested in developing a WHERE app. The tutorial lets you click on a flowchart of an example where API application, highlights the source code that accomplishes that task, and provides a view of what the code displays on a mobile handset.

The WHERE Developer Program overview has more information on using their platform as the foundation for your GPS location-centric application development.

Share This

Monetize Chat Apps with AIM Money

Kevin Farnham, June 23rd, 2008   Comments(1)

AOL is now offering developers who create applications using the Open AIM API the opportunity to make money. AIM Money is a new revenue-share platform where developers profit from ads they embed into their Open AIM applications.

As Stephen Shankland reports over at Webware, AIM Money is enabled by new features in AIM 6.8 and extensions to the Open AIM API. The new developments let developers:

Write software such as the mini-applications that plug into AIM’s own chat software, bots that can communicate with humans on the network, Web-based AIM interfaces, and software that show when AIM members are available online through the service.

The payment model is simple: you are paid for each ad displayed, on a monthly basis, using PayPal.

To get started with AIM Money, go to the AIM Money home page, log into your AIM account, and click the “Sign Up Now” button. Once you agree to the terms, you can get the ad code you need to embed into your AIM application.

The AIM advertisements are packaged into HTML <iframe> elements. The frames, which are served from a subdomain on AOL’s Userplane.com site, come in three different sizes, letting you apply the ad size that works best in your AIM application.

See our WebAIM API page to view some of the types of applications people have developed using Open AIM. For example, the TinyBuddy IM mashup applies AOL’s OpenAuth API along with WebAIM in an IM client that works on the iPhone and iTouch, as well as in standard browsers (more details at our mashup profile).

You can find good tutorials on developing Open AIM applications at the AIM Central site. And by adding in AIM Money you’re on your way to monetizing your next chat application.

Share This

Cut the Clutter with the AideRSS API

John Musser, June 20th, 2008   Comments(3)

AideRSS, an RSS feed filtering service, has recently made available a public API. The AideRSS tagline is ‘Read what matters’ and their mission is to “research every story and filter out the noise, allowing you to focus on what matters most.” Josh Catone from ReadWriteWeb last year described the rationale for the service.

AideRSS uses a proprietary algorithm and scoring system based on comments, trackbacks, and usage in other popular sharing services, to identify the best posts for a particular RSS feed, or set of RSS feeds. You can enter a single feed, site (or an OPML file in their API example app Nizz) to identify the area of interest, and in a few seconds get a result (here’s a list of posts ranked for ReadWriteWeb).

As you can see in our AideRSS API profile, their API calls mimic the functionality of the service - you can programmatically retrieve a list of posts by the AideRSS categories of good, great, and best (there are no bad posts - only bad RSS readers) or explicitly by PostRank(tm) score. An alternative way to filter posts is to request all the top posts for a particular time period and number of posts desired. For publishers there is an API ping call to inform AideRSS of new posts. An unused OAuth call in the API would seem to indicate AideRSS has future plans for the API that would require authorized access.

The documentation includes a PHP class and a Ruby gem to get you started, and results can be returned in XML, JSON, plain text, or JSONP (JSONP involves cross domain callbacks and is deconstructed with a PHP example here). The licensing agreement for the AideRSS API specifies only non-commercial use.

On ProgrammableWeb we’ve listed two mashups so far. The first is a Google Reader extension that lets you view rankings for each feed and custom tweak your settings (more at our mashup profile).

And the second is trawlr, a Web-based RSS aggregator with PostRank from aideRSS built in: to manage existing feeds, for lifestreams, or as a discovery engine with other users (mashup profile).

We’re sure there will be more, as the proliferation of communication services adds to the information overload of a hyperconnected world.

Share This

DayPI Challenge: Mashing-up the News

Kevin Farnham, June 19th, 2008   Comments(2)

The Daylife DayPI Developer Challenge, which offers a US $3,500 first prize and two $750 runner-up prizes, is under way. The contest deadline is July 25th, so developers still have time to enter the competition and win. Build an application (a mashup, a widget, a website, a facebook app, whatever) using the Daylife API, post your application on the Web, then sign up and enter a post about your app into the Daylife Cookbook.

Daylife itself “gathers and organizes news from thousands of sources around the world so that you can learn more about any topic of interest.” The aggregated news content is presented in a variety of forms including Highlights, Topic Pages, Story Pages, Quotes, Connections and Photo Galleries. The API (DayPI) lets you ask questions of the news from around the world and build applications on top of the answers using whatever web application technology you like. The flexible REST-based API supports XML, JSON, and PHP-serialized data formats.

Contest entries will be judged by a stellar panel of judges, including Brian Behlendorf, Marc Hedlund of Wesabe.com, Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com, and Clay Shirky.

Visit the Daylife Cookbook for contest details and useful materials including Daylife API documentation, sample code and tutorials, the Daylife cookbook showcase, and Lazyweb Ideas.

The Lazyweb Ideas are unfinished ideas for applications. These can be used as the basis for your DayPI Developer Challenge application, if you’d like. You’ll find additional inspiration from reviewing mashups that apply the DayPI, like the TreeHugger GRNDX Green Index (mashup details). Similar to a stock market index, but it tracks mentions of certain key green phrases in the media. Lets you gauge how much mindshare certain concepts have and see if they are gaining or losing ground compared to last week.

Or another DayPI mashup: News Trends Trendrr (mashup details), that let’s you track news coverage about anything and view trends on a chart by combining the Daylife and Trendrr APIs.

This competition, along with the WeatherBug Contest, are two of six ongoing mashup contests at the moment. See our Contests page for more details.

Share This

Should the Feds Focus on Reusable Data or User Interfaces?

Raymond Yee, June 18th, 2008   Comments(3)

How should the American federal government make available its data? In a preprint of a forthcoming paper from Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, Government Data and the Invisible Hand , David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Edward Felten, argue for the role of remixable data in government:

Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use….It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

The conclusion is based on a claim that the executive branch is comparatively ineffective at creating tools for presenting data and should therefore leave that work to a private sector (either nonprofit or commercial entities) that is best able to respond to a wide variety of possible uses for government data. That doesn’t mean that the government should provide no user interface to the data, but rather “should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data.” Fancier interfaces and tools should be built by others.

Moreover, the authors have recommended a specific mechanism for ensuring that the government does not privilege any user interface over their public data infrastructure: “require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.”

In a related development, the W3C launched a new eGovernment forum “for governments, citizens, researchers, and other stakeholders to investigate how best to use Web technology for good governance and citizen participation.” The value proposition of the forum, as articulated by Tim Berners-Lee in the press release for the launch, is:

Open Standards, and in particular Semantic Web Standards, can help lower the cost of government, make it easier for independent agencies to work together, and increase flexibility in the face of change. Publishing Linked Data on the Web enables creative re-use of it — citizen mashups, and commercial mashups, which combine the data from many sources to stunning new uses.

I wonder whether Robinson and colleagues would recommend the adoption of “semantic web standards” by the government.

Although there’s a compelling case for making government data available in a richly reusable form, there are concerns that the recommendations by Robinson et al. might cause the government to undervalue the need for good user interfaces provided by the government. A case in point was noted by PC World - Business Center: No Room for Feds in Web 2.0, Study Says:

Robinson acknowledged that some users could have concerns about the authenticity of government data coming from a third-party instead of the agency itself. He said he imagined that the third-party publishers would provide links back to the raw data on the agency Web sites.” — an important point since we depend a lot on the URI of the web page to help us assess the reliability of a site.

For more government related API and mashup news see the /government section of ProgrammableWeb.

Photo credit: Hey Paul

Share This

Build Weather Mashups, Win Prizes

Kevin Farnham, June 17th, 2008   Comments(3)

WeatherBug has announced the WeatherBug API Excellence Contest. The contest will run through July 11th and offers up to five contest winners an 8 GB Apple iPod Touch. The “up to” part of how many winners depends on how many different languages developers use: there will be one winner per programming category like PHP, Java, Ruby, Python or any other. Apps can be web based, mobile or desktop applications running on Windows, OS X or Linux.

The WeatherBug API offers free access to live data from more than 8,000 WeatherBug tracking stations. Using the API, you can develop applications showing live weather conditions, daily forecasts, United States camera images and severe weather alerts, and international weather information.

The API is available in two formats: standard XML and pipe-delimited format. Both API versions offer a rich set of calls, letting you retrieve highly detailed information on weather stations, live weather, alerts, forecasts, and other data.

Currently, our WeatherBug API page lists seven mashups that have been created using the API. These might give you some ideas for developing your own mashup for the contest. For example, Weather Bonk is a rich mashup that provides live weather and forecasts obtained using the WeatherBug API and much more on a Google Map (it actually uses over 10 APIs, more details here). WeatherBonk was a Mashup Camp winner, and was acquired last year by the Weather Channel.

Share This