Nicole Cooper
n7498519
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Final MashUp! Canaan Smith World - n7498519 Nicole Cooper
Introduction
Canaan Smith World is a social media fan site dedicated to the up and coming country music artist Canaan Smith. This mashup brings together his social media in a way to connect with fans in a more personal way and allows users to see a variety of mediums, videos, photos, and text.
Data Sources and Content
- YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/canaansmith
- Instagram - http://web.stagram.com/n/canaansmith/
- Twitter - https://twitter.com/#!/canaansmith
Inspirations
My main inspiration for this website is the wide range of social media that artists are using today to communicate with their fans and make them feel apart of their music and life. Canaan Smith has no current fan sites so I found this the perfect opportunity to make one, where fans can see all of his current images, videos and tweets, allowing a closer connection, in one place.
In terms of design, I found Theory Design as my main inspiration. Their layout of content works well, with the single column that is broken up into sections allowing users to navigate the content easily. It also doesn’t detract from the content, which drives the website. They also use a grid layout to arrange their content. Which I found was the obvious choice in laying out my videos and images.
Screenshots of Canaan Smith World
Got my Twitter streams working, using the Twitter widget as shown in one of Dave’s video tutorials
Change of MashUp idea
Originally planned to do a mashup where users search for a specific artist and it brings up tweets, videos, and news articles for that artist. I have changed my idea as my coding knowledge was giving me difficulties trying to achieve this mashup.
My new mashup idea is a social media fan site for a new country music artist, Canaan Smith. I was going to do a fan site for a more popular artist but I found that Canaan Smith had no fan sites, so there is a market for this. I’ll be using yahoo pipes and PHP. The three data sources I’ll be using are Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Canaan frequently uses all three of these media. His YouTube is updated weekly with new videos and his Instagram and Twitter are used daily. This provides a lot of good live data for fans to connect with. Also I will have a Twitter stream of fans tweets about Canaan. Providing a community between fans and Canaan.
Feedback from peers was helpful and made me think of some new ideas for my mashup, and also had some initial ideas that I disposed but now may include in my mashup.
May include YouTube or Flickr instead of Last.fm as a data source. As it would provide a different type of media to balance out the text from Twitter and Billboard.com.
Re-thinking my wireframe. Originally was going to have 3 columns on one page, then changed my mind to have links to each section. But may go back to one page if I can think of a creative and effective layout. Will have to do some further wire-framing.
Data Sources
Twitter - Twitter Search API, allows you to run searches of recent tweets. Can not search for tweets older than a week. Only provides the most relevant tweets.
Billboard.com - Has a general RSS feed that gives you all the latest news. While also providing RSS feeds specific to artists, bands, songs, and charts on Billboard.com.
Last.fm - Uses a number of different APIs, I think the ones that will be useful to me are, artist.search and artist.getTopTracks. artist.search allows users to search an artists name, and returns matches sorted by relevance. artist.getTopTracks allows users to get the top tracks by an artist, ordered by popularity.
MashUp Case Studies
Wiki FM - Is a mashup between Wikipedia and Last.fm. Allows users to view Wikipedia information on a song while listening on Last.fm.
MusicPortl.com - Similar to my mashup idea, MusicPortl gathers photos, videos, and information about a particular artist. Data comes from Amazon, Flickr, Last.fm, Ontok, MusicBrainz, YouTube and Wikipedia.
These two mashups are the main inspiration for my mashup.
MashUp Wireframe and Colour Scheme
I drew inspiration from the above website layouts:
All of them are simple and minimalistic which I like. Bagsofjoy’s layout I especially like with the side navigation bar and then the content flows across the page.
