Guardian creates 'live music map' of reader gig reviews

The Guardian has launched a "live music map", inviting readers to submit Instagram pictures of gigs and submit band reviews via Twitter.

Readers are asked to use the #GdnGig hashtag to contribute. The reports are then curated and some selected to appear on a crowdmap.

Viewers of the map can then use it to explore what gigs are happening and see reports in real time.

The open-ended live music project launched on Friday (23 November) and currently shows around 200 reader reports.



It was created using n0tice, an online noticeboard that grew out of a Guardian hack day and launched as a platform that anyone can use. It launched an open journalism toolkit in May, enabling any news site to create a crowdmap.

Matt McAlister, who leads the n0tice project, told Journalism.co.uk that the live music crowdmap was built by setting up a dedicated noticeboard on n0tice, where journalists can curate and moderate the pictures and reports submitted.

Developers then "built an app on top of the data", McAlister said, customising a Google Map.

McAlister explained that it works in a similar way to Hash Gordon, a tool that allows news sites to embed collections of images shared on social media and fed into n0tice. The Guardian used Hash Gordon earlier this month to gather and share images of readers favourite band t-shirts.

McAlister said that the live music map project "could get exciting as we start to see more activity", adding that the Guardian journalists may choose to display the contributions in different ways, such as photo galleries of Instagram pictures taken at gigs.

The live music map is at this link.

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