My habit's getting truly out of hand. I'm addicted to linking my weblog to as many external services as I can - so many, in fact, that a recent posting set off a string of over 100 requests and commands. It's not surprising: the most popular sites offering the APIs (applications programming interfaces) that Jack Schofield writes about elsewhre today, are also among the most popular sites in the weblogging community. Indeed, open internet APIs are one of the technologies that the weblogging community has pioneered.
Perhaps the most used of these APIs are the weblogging systems themselves. The Blogger, Metaweblogger and LiveJournal APIs allow you to write and edit weblog posts from programs that run on your own machine, instead of the more usual web-based interface. Programs such as Kung-Log and EspressoBlog all give you a better user interface, luxuries such as spellchecking, and the ability to write blog entries while offline. Then, via the weblogging APIs, they post them quickly when you get a connection.
Developers are also using the weblogging APIs to create a variety of applications that can post to your blog. Mobile phone services use this system, as does Audblog.com, which lets you post audio blog entries from a telephone.
Once you've posted, you might want to see who is linking to you. Here's where the Technorati.com API comes in. David Sifry's blog-tracking site offers a whole range of ways for programmers to find out things like these. This is the API I use the most: my blog displays the number of other blogs linking to it, and links itself to the latest one, all via the Technorati API. It also makes a query for every address that I link to, and notes the real name of the site and the number of other blogs linking to it.
The Amazon API is also incredibly popular. Amazon Light, for example, uses the API to provide a clean, clutter-free interface to the online retailer, while Amazon RSS provides news feeds based on searching Amazon for keywords. But the outstanding example must be All Consuming, which can show you exactly which books the blogging community is currently making a fuss about. Erik Benson's site tracks the list of updated weblogs held at Weblogs.com, looking for mentions of books. Then it retrieves additional details about them, including the cover art, using the Amazon API.
The cover picture is the Amazon API's secret weapon. The company's API policy allows anyone to take the cover art from any of the books, CDs, videos and DVDs held in its catalogue. This enables applications like Clutter to automatically display the cover art of the album when you are listening to an MP3 file. Apple's new music program, iTunes4, also has this ability, and since its launch, a great deal of effort has gone into automating the taking of Amazon's images for people's iTunes databases. (The sordid secret is that many of us used to spend a few hours doing it manually.)
The launch of the Google API really captured the imagination of the developer community. The Google Hacks book, published by O'Reilly, is the bestselling computing book of the year (though may be challenged by the new Amazon Hacks). Many of the hacks themselves are quite low-key, but make up for it with their ubiquity. Also, the inclusion of Google API support within the Movable Type blogging application now means that hundreds of weblogs are decorated with the results from automated searches. Receiving the results from a Google search into a small program means that programmers can style the output to look however they wish, or take the data and refine it further. Dave Winer does this with his new weblog search tool.
This ability to get at the raw data, and then do interesting things with it before putting it on the screen, is the very point of these APIs - and a point that rapidly transforms itself into a yearning. Once you have played with these things - and in most cases, they are very simple to use - you start wanting APIs on every site you interact with.
My online banking service, for example, is utterly crippled by a terrible user interface - what I would give for an API that just let me find my balance? Travel sites, train timetables and newspaper archives would all benefit from offering a programmable interface. Most users would never touch it, but those who did could create products that really help.
Useful links
www.benhammersley.com
www.Technorati.com
http://allconsuming.net
http://allconsuming.net
www.yaywastaken.com/amazon
http://scriptingnews.userland.com
