The Filter: Team Blog

Here’s my top four singles of the year so far… I would do a top five, but I’d have to put Violet Hill by Coldplay in there and that would make me look deeply uncool.

Daddy’s Gone - Glasvegas

Glasvegas are either going to be a grimy, noisy band for the ages - angry anthems sung at festivals for years to come, or failing that they’ll be irritating by this time next month thanks to NME/BBC overexposure.

This isn’t the best song on the album, that’s probably ‘Flowers and Football Tops’.

Either way, singing along to these guys in a thick Scottish accent is enormous fun.

Two Doors Down - Mystery Jets

This is a great, catchy pop song. Reminds me of The Cure at their playful best. Unfortunately, the girl who lives Two Doors Down is about six years old, and doesn’t play the drums late at night but plays ‘The Entertainer’ on piano, before school in the morning and again, just after Blue Peter.

Oh, and it has a saxophone solo.

The Filter says: If you like Two Doors Down by Mystery Jets - then you should check out Happy by the Frames and You Own Me by The American Analog Set.

Lykke Li - Dance, Dance, Dance

Don’t know how to say the same. Is it pronounced lie-kay lee? Anyway this is another fun pop song, which is really melodic and fun - yet really minimal. I like what they’ve done with this album, left many of the tracks to be pretty bare and all about the percussion and vocals which has lent itself really well to remixes.

Oh, and it has a saxophone solo.

The Filter says: If you like Dance, Dance, Dance then you might like Higher Than The Sun by Primal Scream and Drugs by Dennis Leary

TV On The Radio - Golden Age

When I first heard this song I was devastated. Where’s the apocalyptic, crushing doom guitar? Where’s the weirdness? That doesn’t matter - they’ve clearly distanced themselves between ‘Return to Cookie Mountain’ and have created this synth-funk masterpiece. Reminds me of Talking Heads/Prince and also Midnite Vultures era Beck, which is probably a bit of a lazy comparison, but it shares that electro-indie-funk-sexxx feel.

Granted, this is nothing compared to ‘Wolf Like Me’, but it is still damn good fun - and the way it builds with vocal harmonies and violins is superb and built for repeat listens. It’s officially got groove.

Oh, and its got synth sax.

The Filter says: If you like TV On The Radio then you should check out the songs ‘Song Beneath the Song‘ by Maria Taylor and No Wow by The Kills

The nerds at Google released their new browser Chrome the other day. I’m not sure whether this is going to be a proper play at taking over the desktop web browsing experience - or if it will be more like the move Apple made when they released Safari for PC, which was a bit of a tie in with the iPhone/dev kit sort of thing. So this might be part of the strategy for Android, or it might be a full blown Bill Gates assassination attempt.

Taking a peak at our Google Analytics stats it appears that 2.61% of visitors to The Filter are using Chrome, knocking Opera out of the big four. It will be interesting to see how much this percentage grows and if they seriously start eating into Firefox’s or Explorer’s market share.

That reminds me… I’ve got no idea if Chrome loads The Filter or not. I’ll have to grudgingly boot into Windows and try it out.

We’ve just pushed a new update to the website which addresses lots of small issues that have been niggling away at us here in The Filter’s world headquaters in Bath.

There’s lots of small stuff, and to be entirely honest (and unprofessional) I’d like to admit that I can’t remember most of the stuff we’ve done.

One of the things that I’ve just noticed (but had entirely forgotten up to this point) is that we’ve added a new slider to the movies page that lets you find film similar to the film you are viewing that got good reviews.

So, you can search for ‘The Godfather’ and not only find similar films to the Godfather, but you can filter it so that you see films that were similar to The Godfather that got good reviews. Officially Useful.

Here’s a screenshot:

There’s a whole bunch of other stuff, such as improvements to the way you can import your profiles from Last.fm and Flixster. If I can remember any other stuff, I’ll let you know.

The new version (it’s so much better) of The Filter for Mac and PC is due to be released in the next few days - so look out for that. Honestly, the playlists are 100% better.

The Filter have been announced as Grand Finalists for Popkomm’s IMEA awards, which takes place in Berlin. (IMEA stands for Innovation In Music and Entertainment)

I’ve heard that this is like the Olympic Games for tech companies and we’ll have to go head-to-head with our bitter rivals at other entertainment websites over formidable tests of human endurance.

Here’s the spesh badge that we’ve been given, soon to be printed out and safety-pinned to the chests of all of The Filter team:

We’ve been nominated for ‘The Industry Standard’s‘ Innovation awards.

They’ve told us we were nominated because readers of The Standard felt The Filter “had distinguished itself as an innovation leader.” Which is pretty cool.

Because we’re from the UK, we’re in the ‘International’ category alongside sites like the iPlayer and Netvibes

If you’d like to vote for us click the following link and give us a green thumbs up. If we win, I promise that we will replace the wooden background with something far cooler.

The latest release of TheFilter website  includes an RSS service to which users can subscribe to get recommendations and filtered news fed directly to their favourite rss aggregator.

You  can get to these by clicking on the RSS buttons on the start/index  pages.

There are also a few new features that are not yet exposed via website controls, but you can get to them directly by creating the the url  for the rss feed  yourself.  The URLs follow this general pattern:-

http://webservices.thefilter.com/3.0/FilterRssService/FilterRss.ashx?user=<userid>&number=<N>&type=<feedid>&genre=<gid>

where userid = your user id, N is the number of items items to return, and feedid is one of the  following:-
 
0 - music recommendation
1 - film recommendation
2 - webclip recommendation
3 - music news
4 - film news
5 - all items shared with (to) you (including cached recommendations  from 0,1,2 )  
6 - all ratings you have made
7 - all items you have played
8 - your influence cloud (special case; number=0 shows rating cloud, number>0  shows velocity cloud , which shows what is _changing_ )
9 - your recent activity  (ratings, plays, shares etc.)
10 - all recent activity  (a view of what all users are doing)  

[genre=<gid> is optional for feedid=0,1,2 i.e. for music/film/webclip recs. it is ignored for other  feeds.]
 
items  0.. 4  are run on a refresh cycle of 1 hour, with results cached in the intermediate time .  These are accessible from the RSS buttons on the website home page.

items 6-10  are new, and included for you to play with. All are done on demand i.e. not cached.

http://webservices.thefilter.com/3.0/FilterRssService/FilterRss.ashx?user=1228&type=8&number=0

There’s a fair bit of work to be done in visualising the influence cloud data, and RSS isn’t necessarily the best transport for complex visual data like this, but this was thrown in mainly as a debugging aid for me developing the underlying cloud algorithms.  Lots of people here liked the idea that we could look at the info in this way, hence I sneaked it into the public RSS feeds 

I hope you find these new features useful, and i look forwards to hearing your suggestions for other service information that could be provided through this feed mechanism.

If you try to play a song on The Filter today you won’t be able to hear it, because there is a problem with our audio clip supplier. Should be fixed in the next few hours.

The Filter is featured on the BBC’s flagship technology program ‘Click’.

You can watch it via iPlayer for the next seven days, or find out more on the Click website.

The Filter has just been updated and we’ve addressed a stack of issues that have been raised by you over the past month that the site has been live. If you’ve contacted us to let us know any of your issues - then many thanks.

The updates have fixed loads of issues, but I’ll just fire off the four most pressing things that should now have been fixed.

Firstly, the player should now be fixed for all users – we’ve made it work for older versions of Flash.
We’ve also added more music genres to The Filter as a lot of our users were rightly miffed that we had ‘rock/pop’ as a genre. We’d love feedback on how you’d like The Filter to evolve in this respect. You can now check out your recommendations in different genres by using the drop down menu that should have now magically appeared.

You should also go and have a look at our new item-pages. Go search for you favourite band or film and tell us what you think.

Thanks for all your feedback so far, many of the smaller issues that you’ve raised have been addressed in this update – but do let us know if there’s anything else you think we should take a look at.

Oh, and enjoy the glorious fourth of July if you’re an American and the parade/beer/fireworks/hotdogs things that you do for it.

This week we’re featured on one of the best tech podcasts going, The Guardian’s Tech Weekly Podcast. It has an interview with Peter Gabriel and our CEO David Maher Roberts. It also features INCREDIBLY cheesy intro music.

Give it a listen and you’ll discover all about The Filter as it stands and the things that we’re up to in the labs. Sounds like they are doing the interview in a kitchen though.

Tech Weekly is also available in the iTunes Store