I was doing one of my regular checkins with my friend Anne Wootton (@annewootton) of Popup Archive today, something we try to do regularly, to share stories about what they are up to in the world of audio and podcast API, and what I am seeing across the voice, audio, video, and wider API landscape.
Anne was walking me through their latest rollout AudioSear.ch, a full text search & recommendation API for podcasts and radio, that is API driven. One of the endpoints for the AudioSear.ch API allows for searching of people who are involved with the podcasts and radio programs that they are indexing. As we talked, she articulated that in order to help people see the value the AudioSear.ch People API, rather than just telling them about it, they were building micro applications, that demonstrated it.
This may seem obvious too many, but I've made a career out of shining a light on the obvious, and with APIs being such an abstract concept, little ideas like this can go a long ways. In this era of microservices, the concept of micro, portable, simple, and focused goes a long way, and what AudioSear.ch is doing with their people API is something that other API providers should consider as well.
Sometimes, the little things like a demo micro application built on top of your API can be the thing that plants a seed in someones mind about what your API does--a seed that over time could grow into something much, much more. I already advocate for other code related building blocks like SDK, PDKs, and starter projects--maybe I'll add micro apps as a building block and see if I can incite API providers to deploy more of them to support API operations.
