In recent travels it’s been made known to me that the next big thing after sliced bread and the colour ‘black’ is this internet thing we’re all keen about at the moment. The music industry has been shaken to the very core of recent times with blame being laid firmly on those pesky mp3’s and Apple Computer’s but it seems not all is bad in the world of 1’s and 0’s.

[caption id=“attachment_311” align=“aligncenter” width=“565” caption=“We Are Hunted”]We Are Hunted[/caption]

We Are Hunted is a collaborative effort between Native Digital and Wotnews that draws on the people power that is social networking and blogs to create a chart of the hottest 99 tracks in the world today. The technology behind the site is the same technology used to aggregate the news on Wotnews.com.au.

I threw an email their way with a few questions attached about how the chart was run and where it was going and this is how it all went down.

JW: What has been the driving force behind your team’s development of wearehunted.com? WAH: We are huge music fans and consume music online, each in different ways. We had a mix of skills and decided to put together an essential online music property - something we wanted to visit every day.

JW: The website states the chart is driven by sentiment, expression and advocacy. Would you explain that on a more human and practical level. Is there an emotions engine that measures how many times a song title has the word “omg” next to it or do real people scour real blogs and websites? WAH: The engine is automated. Our analysis includes sentiment detection to work out whether people like or dislike a track. Semantics to understand who people are talking about. Clustering and classification to group related artists and their noise. And network analysis to uncover the connections between artists and the people who write about them.

JW: Do industry sources, for good or for evil, have any impact on the chart? (i.e. Record labels, distributors or artists) WAH: None whatsoever.

JW: Today on the chart there are remixes of current popular songs, mainstream popular music and a good portion are independent or emerging artists. There has even been some older popular songs come back into the chart. How would you say this reflects the community who influence the chart. WAH: I think there is definitely a diversity of music tastes out there. Even within our team there’s a love for everything from commercial to rare DnB.

JW: Traditional charts have been geographically based and also split up into genres along with a mainstream chart. We Are Hunted has been billed as the chart for the people but the people still live in different cultures and have different music tastes, how will wearehunted.com reflect this diversity? WAH: We Are Hunted will reflect the aggregate of all these people’s online musical activity.

JW: What vision have you got for the chart into the next 6 months and the next 1-3 years? WAH: First and foremost we want the site to be an essential destination for its users. We access and analyse extraordinary amounts of data and we intend to work with companies to help them know and understand what we know.

I’m a big fan of what is happening in the We Are Hunted camp, it’s a website you can set to be your homepage because every day it’s a new chart. As a web application it runs very nicely and smoothly, you can click on a song and listen to it, although some of the audio is sometimes missing or a very different mix to the radio release or even album release.

The music you’ll find on there is very diverse, mainstream through to indie and everywhere in between. Typically it is music that demographically is appreciated by the 18-30 year old age bracket because they are the people that are typically blogging or tweeting about the music they’re loving, but that’s alright by me because I’m 27 and loving the music on the chart.

Load it up, set it as your home page and start blogging cause We Are Hunted is watching!