Roots Archives Forum

Greetings,

I have started a website called [RootsVinylGuide.com](http://www.rootsvinylguide.com). This site is an automated tracker for the results of bidded upon EBay auctions in the category of Reggae & Ska records. This means that it will automatically fetch results for finished auctions (every 20 minutes) in the mentioned category with 1 or more bids. My goal is to help get a sense of the market value, scarcity, and proof of existence of a record over time. I used the 'greater than 1 bid' metric as an indicator of actual interest and hence, market value. It is also a cool place to discover rare records, being that EBay does not provide any support for free text searches on historical data (it only allow direct linking).

For those of you familiar with PopSike.com, the idea of my site is not different. However, the data will be more focused and comprehensive in it's category, and less stale. I hope to soon begin on a tagging system in order to properly categorize the auction results (by producer, backing band, etc.), which I believe could lead to some very interesting music discovery. Please let me know you opinions. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Roots,
Jah Chicken

P.S. The site is still in it's very early stages and I have a long todo list.

Congrats, your site looks like it's off to a great start with the possibilities of some very cool information!

Chris

Thanks Chris! Much appreciated. Please let me know if you find any issues or suggestions for improvement.

Roots,
Jah Chicken

Wha! Impressive!

Usefull site !! Thanks for setting this up Jah Chicken

Would be nice to click on an artist /label to get the other tunes. As my website knowledge is close to zero, i don't know if it's easy or not but would be nice tho.

Big up

add in my favourite! great work! thanks a lot!

Great idea - very nice!

Many thanks guys! I really appreciate the willingness to check it out.

zonard wrote: Would be nice to click on an artist /label to get the other tunes.

I agree zonard that this would be a very nice feature! This is exactly the problem that I will attempt to address with the ability to tag results. The fact is that EBay doesn't have the canonical input fields that a lot of us are interested in (stuff like record label, producer, etc). Sellers tend to enumerate this data in the title or description if they know it, making it difficult for a computer to understand its meaning. Even if they did, many EBay sellers will only know different pieces of this data. I hope that proper categorization by humans (i.e. reggae enthusiasts) will have place these results in the appropriate buckets. After this step is done, recommendations, similar tracks, etc. will be possible.

Thanks Again,
Jah Chicken

Yes breda, great idea, maybe itll act a bit against the popsike over-estimation... very usefull, thanks, in my favourite too...

I'm not an eBay buyer/seller myself, but this certainly is worth checking out!!