| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Music Internet |
| Founded | April 2009 |
| Headquarters | Brisbane, Queensland |
| Key people |
Nick Crocker, founder Ben Johnston, founder Stephen Phillips, Wotnews founder |
| Products | Online music aggregation |
| Website | wearehunted.com |
We Are Hunted is a music aggregation website that launched in April 2009. It tracks the 99 most popular emerging songs online each day across blogs, social media platforms, forums, P2P networks and Spotify via an intuitive web interface. The site was developed as a result of a joint partnership with digital innovation start-up Native Digital and Australian news search engine Wotnews.
Contents |
By combining activity on blogs, social media platforms and forums, We Are Hunted accesses musical trends that traditional charts cannot. We Are Hunted aims to help listeners find new music and to help artists reach new audiences.
The site's song, artist and genre charts are updated in real-time to reflect what people are saying and playing each day. This is achieved by continuously sampling conversations that occur on music news sites, blogs, and social media.
We Are Hunted also monitors the mainstream press, blogs, Twitter, Spotify, MySpace, YouTube, Last.FM, iLike, BitTorrent, and Limewire.
The site's per-track analysis includes sentiment detection to distinguish whether people like or dislike particular songs; semantics to understand exactly who people are talking about; clustering and classification to group related artists, and network analysis to uncover the connections between artists and the people who write about them.
"So many websites are too complex, too wordy, too long. I wanted this site to be digestible in three seconds ... to deliver users exactly what they want — amazing, new music, every day." - Nick Crocker, We Are Hunted founder, May 2009.[1]
The website concept arose from a discussion between founders Nick Crocker and Ben Johnston in early 2008.[2] Crocker met Stephen Phillips, the founder of Australian news search engine Wotnews, in November 2008. Crocker and Johnston finalised the site concept, gave it a name and designed the front end, while Phillips and the Wotnews team took over with the development of the site and the customisation of the semantic search platform.[2]
The site was launched on April 17, 2009. It was featured on popular online technology blogs Wired [1], TechCrunch [3], Mashable [4] and TechNation.[5] We Are Hunted received over 100,000 visits in its first week online.[2]
We Are Hunted is a web-based Boxee application driven by the News Server product from Wotnews. It is built on an open source platform featuring Linux, MySQL, Python, Django and Sphinx. The server also powers Wotnews' Australian news site as well as providing news and stock market analytics for some of Australia's biggest banks. At its core, it is able to aggregate, analyse and search news, blogs and social media in near real-time.