One piece of exciting news about the site’s new launch is that we have a new way of letting the community get involved with the site. Instead of the Dots maintaining and updating their prolific discography by themselves (over 200 releases!), we’ve started using a public database that everyone can edit and improve! We’re integrated with Freebase, a very nifty database.
Most of you have heard of Wikipedia, and Freebase is similar:
“Freebase is an open database of the world’s information. It is built by the community and for the community—free for anyone to query, contribute to, build applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.”
So take a look at the new Discography. If you have a correction to make, or album cover art scanned, you can make the changes on Freebase and they will show up immediately! And Freebase not only lets you enter in track listings for albums, but also the track lengths…plus there’s a lot of space for putting in many other things if you know them, like where a song was recorded or who engineered the album… (Album properties), (Track properties).
But our discography here on legendarypinkdots.org isn’t the only place where having good information about the songs and albums will help. The information is regularly synchronized with MusicBrainz, and if you’re familiar with how sometimes you put a CD in the computer and it just “knows” the track names… then it’s from databases like MusicBrainz that this information comes. Also, there are many other fun FreeBase applications, like this timeline.
Our “official” discography remains on brainwashed.com. We’re hoping this experiment in information sharing is a move in the right direction. If the information in FreeBase gets more accurate and comprehensive than ever, that will be great to see. So why not make a Freebase account right now? If you have access to a scanner and have a rare album, why not upload the cover art if it’s missing? If you see some tracks and their length aren’t on for an album, why not type them in? Freebase is easy to use, and if you have any questions just write us and let us know…
(Note: We want to thank technology blogger Hostile Fork for “Albumist”, the free program we’re using to generate the discography from Freebase!)
