Gavin ShinfieldKyan Festive 50 2012
♫ ♪ Christmas time is here — sherry, schnapps and beer… ♪ ♫
Anyway, yes it’s Christmas, and yes in time-honoured tradition and in honour of the late great John Peel we’ve prepared a list of tunes that have kept us tapping away (feet and keyboards) over the past year.
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Tags: music, jukebox, kyan, festive 50
Kyan Festive 50 2011 (YES! I said 2011 ...)
Like whoa, timewarp! As we approach the year end and a young(ish) man’s thoughts turn to end of year lists I realised that we never got round to publishing last year’s Festive 50, ah well, better late than never …
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Tags: music, jukebox, kyan, festive50
Robin WhittletonBehind our jukebox
If you take on Kyan as a client you’ll soon be aware that we love our music in the office.
We used to use a 3rd party music player, but decided a few years ago to build our own; this gives you a lot more flexibility in exactly how it works.
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Tags: jukebox, javascript, rails
Paul SturgessKyan Jukebox hits landmark 60,000 last.fm scrobbles
Ok so the headline may be a little over dramatic, but music plays a large part in shaping the Kyan office atmosphere. The soundtrack to our working lives, there is music on from 8am ’till gone 6pm every day.
Kyan Festive 50 2010
Yes indeedy, it’s listmas time again, and here’s the one you’ve all been waiting for, the Kyan team top tunes of the year.
How do you rate?
I’ve posted recently about our office jukebox and the music we play on it. What I didn’t mention, however, is that the most hotly contested aspect surrounding it is not the music that gets played, but the way in which we can all vote on the tracks. Well if Pete’s going to be dropping Christmas covers in October then we all need to let him know it’s not right!
Recently I came across an article on the Youtube official blog that detailed some interesting insight into the way users vote for videos on their site. In a nutshell Youtube has a 1-5 rating system in which overwhelming majority of videos have a rating of 5 stars, some do get 1 star but there’s not much inbetween. Their conclusion…
“When it comes to ratings it’s pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference.”
We actually started off with a system much like the Youtube rating model, but we quickly found the same pattern emerged. So we dropped it for a simple thumbs up/down and we’ve never looked back.
It’s interesting debate though as rating systems are often contentious issues when building websites but when a site like Youtube, with that many users, publishes those kind of results you have to consider if it’s the definitive word on the matter.
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Tags: jukebox, youtube
The Kyan soundtrack
Like any office there are a wide variety of musical tastes represented amongst us here at Kyan.
Through our communal jukebox these tastes come together to form a musical backdrop to our time spent working in the office.
A few months back we created a last.fm account, hooked up the Jukebox with the last.fm api and now we are recording a full history of our playlist with some 10,000+ tracks ‘scrobbled’ so far.
Here’s the top 5 artists we’ve been playing the last few months…
1. Lone
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3. Florence + The Machine
4. Little Dragon
5. Gorillaz
Our current top 5 artists of all time are…
1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2. Lone
3. Mr Scruff
4. The Beatles
5. Röyksopp
That top 5 artists list changes quite regularly, but it’s an interesting snapshot.
Those artists have certainly been helping us drown out the constant drilling from the building work going on over the road from us on Guildford High Street.