May 31, 2006

challenge accepted! (i think)

Seth Godin posed a calendar aggregation challenge, effectively describing the goal of EVDB and Eventful. We feel your pain, Seth, and we've been working hard to make it happen.

He then goes on to ask why it's so hard: "If each venue published their schedule as an RSS feed, it seems trivial to put this together." That's a point I can answer: events are hard, not trivial at all. They encompass all of time and space, from the Royals playing at Kauffman Stadium to the guy playing guitar at a nearby bookstore next Friday. Worst of all, the people who know about them write them down on little pieces of paper because it's easiest that way. Most of them have never heard of RSS. Collecting them all into a single place (aka aggregating them) is a huge task, but it's a task we've taken on.

What do we have so far? A way to search for events by location (Kansas City) or radius (10 miles from my house) or tag (baseball) or keyword (Royals) or time (next weekend) or a dozen other ways and combinations. A dozen ways to get those lists of events, including RSS , ICAL, and JSON. A decent-and-getting-better way to give us events in ICAL, RSS (plus microformats), or via our API. Plus a big bunch of events and venues that we've already gathered and cleaned up.

It's not complete by any stretch of the imagination, but it's getting there, and we're committed to making it a reality. And (in my very-humble opinion) we're the ones to get it done. So, challenge accepted.

Chris

I hope I didn't offend! That wasn't my intent.

I know how hard this is. I also know that there's no way to find all the minor and major league baseball games being played within 50 miles of Manhattan this weekend.

I'm betting you guys can solve that one. Thanks for reading, and especially for the hard work.

No offense at all, Seth! You asked perfectly valid questions, and your frustrations are exactly what we all feel when trying to get things as complete as possible. I originally wanted to answer your "all baseball within X miles of KC" question with an Eventful search, but I realized that our Royals events (from Ticketmaster, I think) aren't tagged "baseball". Argh! We're doing something about that, but there are a million other issues still left to deal with.

That's why we're supporting stuff like Pingerati, which will hopefully get more people on the share-your-events bandwagon. I can't wait for a time when most RSS feeds about events have hCal+hVenue+YADIS, so we can just suck 'em in and index them like any other Web content.

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