Following on from Jon Udell's post, as far as I can see (and I'm saying this because I like upcoming.org and I'd like it to be in a state where everyone could use it), upcoming.org isn't more popular because:
- It's a pain in the arse to enter new events. For example, the time's in 12hr am/pm format, with drop-down menus for each part. There doesn't have to be a full-blown API, but just a way to add an event from an external link like:
http://www.upcoming.org/addevent?category=1&startdate=2005-03-25&starttime=2000&name=U2
would make things a huge amount easier. The description and the venue would still have to be entered or chosen by hand, so there's still a barrier to spam. - Related to the above point, there's no way to import a calendar event from another system. Say if someone sent me an email for an event with formatted data attached, I'd have to go and type that all in again into upcoming. I'm not sure there's a well-defined standard for transmission of calendar events like this yet though, so that's forgiveable.
- There are no moderators for each metro. For example, artist names are supposed to be separated by commas, but if someone doesn't follow those rules there's no way for someone else to fix it. Same with venue details -- if someone doesn't enter the address for a venue, or misspells the name, it's stuck like that forever.
- The map links only work for North America. It would be easy to fix that with a bookmarklet or GreaseMonkey script, but the system needs to know about different map servers for Europe, at least.
- And, of course, unlike Flickr or del.icio.us, there's no forum, mailing list or anywhere else to discuss things like this.
Comments
All fields are optional, email address will not be shown; no HTML, URLs are automatically hyperlinked.
All great points, especially the last one. Jon's article was a good catalyst for change, so I'm forcing myself (at the risk of public embarrassment) to crank out some long-needed features on the site over the next week. After that, let's talk about your requested changes.
Oh, here's a list of the changes I'm planning to make:
http://upcoming.org/news/archives/2005/03/21/jon_udel/
upcoming.org was great for a while... I used it for a couple months to track shows that I wanted to see. It really started to bother me that there were 4 different versions of the same venue name in the database, and that it was impossible to update information or correct bad information that had been entered by others. Anyone could add anything, and there wasn't a way to conveniently change it.
I found it was easier for me to just use "calendar of events" on my own site... The shared aspect of upcoming.org wasn't enough to hold my interest. I just tell everyone I know in Vancouver to visit http://foo.ca/coe - they can't add anything, but they know what I'm thinking of seeing, and if anyone tells me about a show I feel I might consider attending, in it goes...
You wrote: "It's a pain in the arse to enter new events."
This is an inevitable problem when we're using the old Web 1.0 assumption that if you're publishing structured data, you have to use someone else's site and tools to do so. Personally, I think that sites like upcoming.org or evdb.com should be focusing less on trying to get people to publish on these common sites and more on making it possible to publish events (with common formats) on our own sites. Then, just like web search engines gather up data from the visible web, these event sites should be pulling the event data off *our* blogs. Doing this means that the event sites should focus more on collecting data by reading RVW or Structured Blogging data (http://structuredblogging.org). (Note: Hopefully, someone will propose a better event format for sb...)
Sites that require you to explictly publish to them using forms or API's break a lot of the assumptions that we have about how the net should be structured. These sites end up creating monopolies over other people's data since they control the entire production chain from event-publishing to search, presentation, etc. Thus, they compete based on the events that they have "captured" rather then the service they provide. If all events sites, or all potential events sites, had access to the same data then they would have to compete based on the services they provide -- not just on how many people they have been able to convince to publish through them.
bob wyman
Bob,
I'm confused by your comments.
You say, "Personally, I think that sites like upcoming.org or evdb.com should be focusing less on trying to get people to publish on these common sites and more on making it possible to publish events (with common formats) on our own sites."
But these are part of this tagging / "social" wave of 'sites / services that require publication "on these common sites." Aren't they?...
Am I missing the whole point, or are you? Are you just saying you don't care about that; you just want a calendar that integrates easily with your site? Or do you have a solution in mind to the problem I raise (viz. that info would then be exceedingly diffused, and the whole "social" aspect of these calendar tools lost)?...
I take it that part of the interest in sites like these is that you can find things you wouldn't otherwise find - in particular, that you wouldn't know to search for - per del.icio.us, etc....
I've flagged a duplicate venue about six times now on upcoming.org, and they still won't delete one of them. I'm not sure anyone's even maintaining the site.