DayPI Challenge: Mashing-up the News

KevinFarnham, June 19th, 2008   Comments(1)

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.

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The New York Times API: All the News That’s Fit to Mix

John Musser, June 10th, 2008   Comments(2)

As first reported in mediabistro, The New York Times is planning to release an API sometime this summer. The goal, as editor of interactive news Aron Pilhofer put it, is to “make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data.”

The Yahoo Developers Network has an interview with CTO of Digital Operations Marc Frons that reveals more of the details of this effort. Most of his responses about the technology, scale, and licensing of the API show that the Times will start with the basics and grow as they learn what works. Some highlights:

• different levels of API access to different types of content (not full-text retrieval on all content)
• some restriction on number of requests per time period
• read-only access to start with, read-write later
• multiple formats (XML,RSS,serialized PHP,JSON)
• not decided yet on supporting OpenID
• usage tracking and a developer network

While the editors will continue to decide on presentation and placement of the Times stories, not influenced by clicks or voting of readers, some new social features are coming. Although Frons told mediabistro “we don’t want to be Facebook,” he does say that there will be more user-generated content and that the Times is “interested in giving our readers alternative views and having them share their activities on our site. We’ll be releasing some new features around sharing news and information very soon.”

Data mashups should be possible for outside developers in about six months, with platforms built internally on the API in specific areas: events, books, restaurant reviews, and recipes, with more to follow.

Mediaguardian blogger Jemima Kiss in the U.K. points out that the Telegraph and the Guardian have both made moves to open developer programs, with the Guardian hiring former Yahoo Developer Network director Matt McAlister. We’re sure to see more innovation in the news business as its core revenue base continues to shrink and focus shifts to the online versions.

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Reuters Shines Spotlight on the Information You Need

KevinFarnham, May 29th, 2008   Comments(0)

Reuters Labs has announced the release of their new Spotlight API. Spotlight is a non-commercial platform designed to “allow users to innovate and develop their ideas by harnessing the content Reuters publishes.” Reuters Labs is the R&D branch of Thomson Reuters, the largest information services company in the world.

The objective of making information available in new formats, in a timely manner, with greater simplicity, was a central topic of an interview titled The Coming Revolution in Financial Information at the Money:Tech Conference in New York City this past February. Tim O’Reilly interviewed Devin Wenig, COO of Reuters Group PLC. Spotlight wasn’t mentioned in that interview, but Spotlight surely is one aspect of Reuters fulfilling that objective.

Devin Wenig also talked about Reuters efforts at semantic annotation of content. Remember the Semantic Web? The Reuters Spotlight API:

provides Reuters.com content in the form of multimedia articles, pictures, videos and text news through a set standards based consumer XML APIs. The Spotlight service also provides an option to receive the content automatically annotated with rich semantic metadata.

As you can see in our new API profile the Spotlight API uses the REST protocol, with data available in six different standard data formats including Atom and JSON. Authentication is via an API key. The documentation includes a Handbook and code samples. The Spotlight Forum is available for questions and discussion.

At the Money:Tech Conference, Devin Wenig told us: “150 years ago Reuters used carrier pigeons to transfer information, because that was faster than human carriers.” Today, Reuters continues to innovate, making its vast information universe available through the simple, fast, automated access of this new API.

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Mashup Links and News

John Musser, March 21st, 2007   Comments(1)

Just a quick rundown of some notable mashup-related links and news:

• In Read/Write Web’s Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services, Alex Iskold gives another good analysis of trends in the API and mashup space. In particular he looks at the strategic value of web sites becoming web services, but notes that until more than just a few hundred sites offer APIs, techniques like screen-scraping will continue to be popular mashup techniques.
• Userplane just released their Instant Community product, a turn-key way to quickly add community and communication to any site including voice and text IM, chat rooms, userlists and games. This is related to the mashup trend we’re seeing where besides just offering APIs, providers are also offer higher-level component services like widgets and other simple script components, often via JavaScript and Flash. This can help address multiple audiences but still building off the same provider platform. Userplane is a ProgrammableWeb sponsor.
• On the enterprise mashup front there’s this report on how IBM Goes Goo-Goo for Gadgets. Apparently IBM and Google announced a deal that will integrate Google Gadgets into the WebSphere portal server to give corporate customers access to the 4000+ gadgets in an IT sanctioned way. The story points out that this continues the ‘consumerization of IT’ and that the deal helps earn Google more credibility as they move further into the enterprise.
• And over at IBM’s developerWorks, Elliotte Rusty Harold last month gave his Ten predictions for XML in 2007. Many of these items have implications here including increased adoption of the Atom Publishing Protocol - see Google’s GData APIs for evidence - and the “XML Backlash” we see via increased adoption of simpler data formats like JSON. [via]

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Mashup Camp 3 Roundup

John Musser, January 19th, 2007   Comments(0)

Mashup Camp 3 at MIT in Boston wrapped-up yesterday. It was another well organized, well attended, very successful event organized by David Berlind and Doug Gold. The week began with two days of Mashup University. Lots of good, interesting discussions, some of which we’ve covered here: What Are Tools for Mashups?, and Making Money from Mashups. But there’s a lot of other good coverage of the event out there:

• Anne Zelenka at GigaOM: The Hype Machine, Best Mashup of Mashup Camp 3
• Martin LaMonica at CNET: At MashupCamp, geeks plot future of Web
• Thomas Howe (more)
• Gordon Haff (with more at Illuminata)
• Mashup Camp’s Speed Geeking page
• Greg Cypes from AOL
• Kevin Lawver from AOL
• The folks at Techrigy

Very much looking forward to Mashup Camp 4…

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New del.icio.us API

John Musser, December 21st, 2006   Comments(0)

Quick pointer to Niall Kennedy’s post on del.icio.us API for URL top tags, bookmark count. It appears that there are enhancements to the del.icio.us API designed to help support a new web badge from Yahoo!. As Niall notes “The API is officially unreleased, may be shut down if not used in full Yahoo-constructed blog sidebar badge form, and may be subject to further terms of service.” See also Kevin Burton’s observations in the comments section as well as Dare’s observation that this is the sign of providers ironing-out when to provide APIs and when not to.

On a related note, see this good rant from Dave Winer on God Bless the Re-inventers and the discussion afterwards.

The del.icio.us API has been very popular with mashup developers and there are 60 del.icio.us mashups listed here.

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Goodbye Google SOAP API

John Musser, December 21st, 2006   Comments(5)

There’s been quite a buzz in the blogosphere over the past two days since Brady Forrest over at the O’Reilly Radar blog pointed out that Google deprecated their SOAP search API (see also Philipp Lenssen). If you go to the SOAP Search API homepage you’ll see the message “As of December 5, 2006, we are no longer issuing new API keys for the SOAP Search API. Developers with existing SOAP Search API keys will not be affected.” Instead, Google is recommending that developers use their Ajax Search API (an example of which is shown below).

The ensuing reaction from developers and observers has been quite vocal as you can see at Techmeme. Some saying it’s the beginning of the end for open web data APIs, others say it’s good discipline, a retreat to Web 1.0, or perhaps not surprising. Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet looks at the impact and asks Will Microsoft stay its search API course?. Martin LaMonica over at CNET gives this good recap.

The Google Search API entry is one of the early entries here at ProgrammableWeb. It has now been updated to reflect this change in status.

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Winning News Mashups

John Musser, December 20th, 2006   Comments(2)

As noted yesterday, winning mashups have been announced for contests from both Rhapsody and our sponsor ClearForest. As with Rhapsody, the ClearForest team had good success in getting a very creative range of entries. Because the ClearForest API provides semantic textual analysis many of the mashups do interesting things by processing current news data.

• Optevi News Tracker: First place winner. News Tracker allows for a new form of news reading — entity based navigation. It uses the ClearForest API to facilitate navigation by person, place, organization, company and other key elements. News Tracker’s entity cloud gives an overview of the news and allows you to quickly drill down to items of interest.



• Hype List: Second place winner. An elegant interface combined with a simple focus on one thing. Who is hot today. Hype-list finds the people within entertainment, business and sports news and presents the hot names in an appealing and functionally simple interface.



• Newsmakers of the Day: Third place winner. Mashup of ClearForest and Google Calendar. It places an unobtrusive icon at the top of each day. Click icon for snapshot of people, companies, products and locations in the news. You can drill down to the original news article.

Other honorable mentions included:

• Six Degrees: Find the connection or six-degrees of separation between topics. Mashes RSS feeds with the ClearForest API. Offers REST and SOAP interfaces so you can build on top of it. All connections exposed through RDF.
• PowerRSS: Power RSS is an RSS aggregator, which enables you to classify content in the article. The Power RSS will skim through the article and pick out the relevant articles, by analysing your interest categories.
• Semantic Searcher: Speed reading for news. This site takes popular news feeds and extracts key terms. They are listed in order of popularity within the last 24 hours. The system uses Clear Forest SWS web service with related images via the Flickr API.

You can see all the ClearForest mashups here.

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Rhapsody and ClearForest Winners

John Musser, December 19th, 2006   Comments(1)

As noted earlier this month a number of this fall’s mashup contests have reached their deadlines for entry submission. For two of them, the Rhapsody Web Services Contest and ProgrammableWeb sponsor ClearForest’s Semantic Web Services (SWS) Mashup competition 2006, the mashup entries have now been reviewed and the winners announced. Here’s Rhapsody’s announcement and here’s ClearForest’s press release. Both contests did an excellent job of getting developers to try the APIs, generated a variety of innovative ideas, and lead to some very interesting mashups.

For Rhapsody, where I was one of the judges, there was diversity in how and where the mashups run. Take for example, the winning entry, Rhapsody Remote (which btw, won developer Aaron Murrell a trip for two anywhere in the world to see his favorite band). Aaron created a PC client and Pocket PC interface that turn the Pocket PC device into a remote control for Rhapsody. Here’s his explanation and you can see his mashup below:

Like many other subscribers, I love to listen to Rhapsody streams via an old computer connected to my home stereo. What I’ve been wanting for a long time is a way to avoid the hassle of getting up and messing with that computer to queue up a new set of songs, browse, and search through the Rhapsody catalog. Various hardware solutions and have approached this problem in many ways but often left core features lacking like searching music data outside of the music saved in your library, or playlists. Rhapsody Remote uses Rhapsody Web Services to allow you to search through the Rhapsody catalog, queue up songs and control the Rhapsody client software all from a WiFi connected handheld.

Other winners include:

• Pamela Fox and Ben Lisbakken’s Music Mash, a Google Gadget that let’s you search Rhapsody’s catalog of millions of songs by their lyrics. You can also use it to find YouTube and Yahoo videos.



• Derek Atlansky’s Rhapsody Scrobbler that monitors Rhapsody for tracks played and automatically submits them to the user’s Last.fm profile.
• Nir Tzemah’s Rhapsody Top Feeds gadget that polls top songs and album feeds from Rhapsody RSS to let users stay on top of news about their favorite artists.

There are now 11 Rhapsody mashups listed here with more coming soon.

For the ClearForest contest we’re adding more entries today and tomorrow’s blog post will give you the details on the winners from that one.

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New APIs: Pings, Wikis, and Twitters

John Musser, December 14th, 2006   Comments(1)

While the pace of new APIs over the past three weeks wasn’t up the nearly one per day rate the month before, there have been 26 added over the past 30 days. Included are APIs from big established providers and small startups. Below are a few of note with more coverage coming in the next few days:

• Pingdom: Besides getting you urgent alerts if your website is down or otherwise at risk, the Pingdom web site monitoring service offers this API that lets you dig directly into that monitoring data for detailed status and analysis.
• WikiMatrix: If you are comparing wiki software you can use this API to pull data from their DB of wiki product information
• Twitter: An API for “the global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?”

Total APIs listed here now at 348.

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