Nearing the beginning of each season, previews are a big ticket item, especially in the strong seasons of Spring/Autumn. Some of the best I’ve seen come from hashihime and I rather enjoy the group takes such as on THAT and Scrumptious, but what makes a good preview, and more importantly, why the hell does everyone do the work of gathering the basic information on series separately?
Making the Grade
Technically, it’s not tough to make a good preview, and with the current manual tools, it just takes a little effort.
Minimum Set
- Title of series
- Image of series
- Link to more information about series (preferably the official page)
- A few words from the blog author(s)
Preferred Set
- Official title and alternate/translated title of series
- 360 pixel image or better
- Links to official page, wikipedia article, and media resources
- Production information
- Reasonable description of the series
- Meaningful opinion from the author(s) (blog-likeliness)
Extra Set
- Relations between production and other series
- Relations between series and other works
- Trailers / Previews
- Air dates / Schedule
Perhaps others can recommend more good things for seasonal previews ^_^ Beyond the factual stuff, I value author insight and opinion when reading previews, and often I find one or two sentences is plenty to get the short-take. Though, how much effort does it take for authors to formulate a couple sentences on a series? I’d gander that much more effort is spent gathering pics, links, and info about the series. Is it really necessary?
Pimping melative
So perhaps melative is a fuzzy, under-developed idea to many (I don’t get the necessary time to dev), but one unintended use I recently thought of was in these season previews. One of the aspects to melative is data modularity, and because melative deals strictly with media1, the application/site can be used to retrieve specific data about specific titles in a given media.
Rather than spend a fair amount of time browsing for data, if the meta information of a series in within melative, it is available for use among many blogs. Getting that information is not very difficult2, and loading a given url/api call will return usable javascript. Take Clannad for instance.
This retrieves the meta data on Clannad. (can also retrieve specific meta fields, like production)
This retrieves the standard resources for Clannad.
This retrieves the images for Clannad. (located as such)
Now these links look like garbage for a reason, the text is javascript object notation, and it’s highly usable within a page on the internet, such as blogs. With the data at hand, formating can be left to other code or simple typeset by a blog author…. or auto-magically loaded from javascript.
Is this appealing?
Yes, I haven’t touched melative in a while, but I do believe in it’s potential as a quasi-media-centric-social-wiki-like being. I do plan for some advancements, but the motivation just isn’t there, sorry. This little demonstration, however, does work because of the api.
Currently, I have no tools for pulling this data with code, but if anyone is interested I’m sure I can cook something up. Cheerio~!
1: melative currently caters to art, anime, blogs, comics, doramas, film, literature, manga, music, periodicals, the stage, television, and video games. Visual novels could easily be added.
2: inputting information is currently available for all fields in the API. The web version is limited to Details, Production, Description, Characters, and Standard Resources.
Sorry for not taking advantage of Melative enough D:
Making the season previews made me wish there was some centralized database available for people to look up the necessary info, and it was right under my nose!
At the moment, my co-bloggers and I still do the manual task of researching, and let the power of Excel macros generate the html lol. I wonder if I’m the only blogger who does that. Laziness + geekiness FTW!
Actually, Excel is a nice way to do things. Good that macros are being put to use, makes the job a bit easier in formating. You could actually use a simple php script to make comma-separated output of the desired fields from melative… the only real thing melative needs is a media-type and title. So basically if you had a list of titles a script could easily pull that info from melative… so long as it is in the database (getting someone to put that info in may be an issue, but it’s not difficult).
hehe, melative is not a well-refined “product” since I’m stuck in school or working various non-computer jobs 80% of the time… it doesn’t have a proper development team, and for the scale it really needs 5 or more people. I expect ppl to be skeptical about it, but from the geek-view, it has advantages in modular, automated data.
About the closest thing is for anime is the combination of Anidb/MAL + ANN + google… way too much if you ask me. melative is built around certain ideas that allow these sort of infos to coincide in one place, much like wikipedia.
I never understood why AniDB and MAL don’t maximize “standard resources” … neither of them include a wikipedia link, or cross-link
Wow, that’s certainly helpful. The funny thing is, I’m sure I’ve heard of melative before, but I never actually thought to check into it. This one’s getting bookmarked
@ETERNAL ^^ dozo. Even as the sole developer, I’m still half-half about melative, since I don’t know the true direction, and the web interface is a damn mess. I guess the drawback is that I don’t have much time to progress and it’s not like anyone is putting issues in front of me to fix (though Caitlin’s brief interaction seemed to push me in better momentary directions)….
it’s a big to-do list, but if it ever attracted a small, understanding user-base wanting to make it something, I’m sure it would have better meaning other than me just using it for cool tools and ways about media.
Thanks for the interest, feel free to play with it and figure it out!
[...] this year I wrote about using melative to leech data for season previews, but the ultimate issue has been whether the [...]
[...] once wrote an article on the essence of a Season Preview, with some focus on melative. Today I took a few hours and javascripted a dynamic info-fetcher [...]