Friday, January 19, 2007

Parsing the Fork

Parsefork is a "completely unnecessary music review aggregator" (as the author calls it) that scrapes record reviews from various websites (Pitchfork, Stylus, and Tiny Mix Tapes) and pulls the basic RSS info (artist, title, label, ranking, author,word count) into a sortable, filterable list of information to help find answers to all sorts of meaningless questions.

It's still a work-in-progress, and the clunky interface has an almost Bugzilla-like complexity (a single text box with a search button would work a lot better), but still a lot of fun to play around with. You can take some clueless Pitchfork review (let's take this one for the Hollies' Dear Eloise/King Midas) and discover that the same reviewer gave the Flaming Lips' Zaireeka a 0.0 rating but gave the The Soft Bulletin a 10.0 one year later. Talk about having a critical about-face on an artist!

Unfortunately Mango Starr (the reviewer who wrote this Tiny Mix Tapes slam of the Raconteurs' Broken Boy Soldiers last year) hasn't reviewed anything else for TMT.

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