Peel 2.0 is a mashup written by Erin Staniland and Kelvin Luck at Hack Day London 07.
The BBC provided a database detailing all of John Peel's famous sessions. We took this data and used it to create a timeline which shows you what bands played when. Rolling over a session in the timeline will highlight any other sessions by the same band so you can see who played often and whose career spanned the longest.
Clicking on a session brings up a photo and a biography of the band in question. The photo is found by screen-scraping discogs.com using the hpricot library.
We then use the last.fm API to find similar artists to the selected artist. We use this data to create a spring graph showing the selected artist linked to any similar artists who also appeared did a John Peel session.
The frontend is written in Flex and the backend is written in Ruby on Rails. The whole thing isn't very polished at the moment but that's what you get when two people try to make something in 28 hours! Hopefully at some point we'll find the time to clean it up a bit and let it reach it's full potential, in the meantime check it out and let us know what you think
Oh - and a big thanks to Leigh Kayley for designing us the beautiful logo in the hour before the deadline! Nice one Leigh :)