NPR Launches Open API, offers Widgets
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the privilege of working with Daniel Jacobson of NPR.org in developing a Flash widget that utilizes their newly-released API. The result of these efforts is the Reverbiage World Widget that plots stories on a 3d globe. The widget is written in ActionScript 3.0 using my own 3d engine currently in development.
NPR, National Public Radio, has just released a new API that opens up 13 years of content for use in online mashups and widgets. The API offers customizable data feeds in many different formats, and is very customizable. The content that is avaiable is far greater than the basic RSS-style digest format. Full story text and images are available as well as the audio of the story in various formats. The API offers queries based on topic, program, series and individual search terms. Check out the API and their current offering of widgets.
Hey, congrats! That’s nice validation of your work!
jd/adobe
Comment by John Dowdell — 7/21/2008 @ 10:47 pm
Thanks JD!
Comment by geoff — 7/22/2008 @ 2:04 am
Interesting widget… While the geo based UI is very cool and fun to use… the flashing location indicator is really distracting from the actual news content… I would recommend down playing the blinking while the article is up. In all UI’s blinking=annoying.
Comment by Jon — 7/22/2008 @ 5:58 am
It’s more a pulsing than a blinking.. but I think I could downplay it a bit more. Thanks for the feedback!
Comment by geoff — 7/22/2008 @ 12:07 pm
Nice!
But, please, add in tooltip the name of article – would like to skip opening an article if not interested in the topic.
Is there an option to rotate the globe without clicking the location point?
Comment by sergei — 7/23/2008 @ 9:47 am
Hi Geoff–
Me likey–nice work. What would make this a real killer for NPR station sites like ours would be if you integrated the NPR API topic selector into the widget. Default could be the generic news, but then you could load in any slice of the API. OOOHH–makes me shiver.
Comment by Dale Hobson — 7/24/2008 @ 10:11 am
I like this widget, and can I just tell you how much I want to be able put it on my iPhone and use my touchscreen to move from point to point on this globe? I have NPR app, but I enjoy the idea of searching for stories by region and would really enjoy utilizing my screen. If it happens I will be one of the first to load it up and get to readin’!
Comment by Noelle — 8/5/2008 @ 12:26 am
Nice work. We are building a new site on WordPress, and it would be great to use this widget, but it would need to be vertically oriented to work in more narrow columns. Even in the square graphic above, you can see what is missing in a narrow scaling.
Comment by robert — 8/20/2008 @ 6:39 pm