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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.
Posted by chris at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)
May 24, 2006
Web Services SIG was great!
Thanks to everyone who attended the Web Services SIG in San Jose last night. It was an outstanding event, and we talked about interesting (and technical) API stuff until 11pm. Dave Nielsen and I both posted photos from the event.
I promised to add the slides and source code here , and I will do so soon.
UPDATE: The slides and code are now available. Download the file and use your favorite ZIP archive program to unpack it. Simple instructions are included with the example code.
I also said this blog was at labs.eventful.com, which wasn't true until this morning. Hopefully that didn't lose anyone.
Posted by chris at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2006
convergent evolution...
...or the sincerest form of flattery? You decide. Don't just take Taylor's word for it.
Seriously, though, as a Zvents API developer I applaud their new improved REST API. I look forward to revisiting it soon.
Posted by chris at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2006
Event: May SDForum Web Services SIG
In the Bay Area? Free on the evening of May 23rd? Come see us in action and hear all the secrets of the EVDB API. Brian Dear and Chris Radcliff will present:
Building Apps with the EVDB API
at SDForum Web Services SIG
Tuesday, May 23rd at 6:30 pm
at eBay's Silicon Valley Conference Center
San Jose, California
This will be an in-depth technical discussion, not just another marketing talk. We're going to use the API to build an application, with plenty of time allotted to answer nuts-and-bolts questions about how things work. Hope to see you there!
Posted by chris at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)