Comments on: Cul-de-Sac

By: Help Cul-de-Sac! > Cul-de-Sac

Help Cul-de-Sac! > Cul-de-Sac — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:57:36 +0000

[…] appears to be generating a decent amount of local attention, with 4Talent Central England, Created in Birmingham and the Birmingham Post all having picked up on the site. Which is great […]

By: Dave Allen

Dave Allen — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:38:01 +0000

There’s more on the thinking behind this site here:

http://www.channel4.com/4talent/feature.jsp?id=12686

If you use the highly scientific methodology of blindly typing “Music Reviews” into Google, you’ll be presented with “about 1,390,000” websites. For every critic of the alternative music press in recent years, a webzine has sprung up to fill the void…

By: Pure attention seeker… « Safety in Numbers

Pure attention seeker… « Safety in Numbers — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:48:02 +0000

[…] lovely 4Talent piece mentioned in these pages before, plus Birmingham: It’s Not Shit and Created in Birmingham have picked up on it too, which will hopefully get more people looking at the site and provoking […]

By: Simon Harper

Simon Harper — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:30:16 +0000

Some interesting thoughts above about sharing info – I think there’s great potential for collaboration, with the ultimate aim of giving the music community in Birmingham, and the wider West Midlands region, the recognition it deserves.

That’s the primary objective behind setting up a site like Cul-de-Sac, and what I want to do with the website is host a resource of quality journalism and photography covering the music-related activity based here – the focus being on news, reviews and interviews/profiles because other websites are already doing listings so well.

One well-known musician I recently interviewed commented that “going out to live music is the new staying in” – hopefully the content across all of these sites will encourage people to get out to venues, and if we can then stimulate discussion online about these events then the city may find itself attracting more regular coverage from the national music press.

As a side note – the Cul-de-Sac site won’t be updated during the next couple of weeks, but after that I would hope to upload content regularly and bring some writers and photographers on board. In the meantime, any feedback is very welcome!

By: simon gray

simon gray — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:03:17 +0000

it’d need to be done in such a way that if different sites didn’t all include the same info fields (for example, i generally don’t publicise the promoter at all, let alone give them a separate field !) it’d still work; we’d also need to take account of different sites ‘gaining’ different venues at different times (so would consequently end up having different ids).

i’m definitely too busy to give this much work for the rest of the month, but would be up for a group of us getting together some time in september / october to work something out; i think josh is still on holiday now, but on past conversations he’s said he’s up for all the collaboration he can get – are you interested in the idea, jonny ?

worst thing that could happen could be the 3+ of us having a couple of beers & actually seeing each others’ faces !

By: Jonny (Zimma / WOIB)

Jonny (Zimma / WOIB) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:50:35 +0000

Perhaps a single form for promoters and venues which would post the data to the respective websites using cUrl or something similar. This could also post to upcoming and evdb. Sites would need to share their venue ids and organiser ids so that it worked properly.

By: Jon Bounds

Jon Bounds — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:42:35 +0000

>enter all their listing details into one .csv file (using excel or whatever)

Good idea â€” Google Docs spreadsheets can be a set up to have a web-facing form input.

Even if it wasn’t a direct copy of your DB structure it could be a central point you could all draw info from.

By: simon gray

simon gray — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:35:13 +0000

when you say ‘find ways of sharing your content’ do you mean beyond the bog standard rss feeds that all of us provide ? any ideas would be more than welcomed !

one thing which has been raised is that it would actually be very beneficial if those of us running our listings websites could come together to agree on a standard schema which would allow venues & promoters an easy way to – for example – enter all their listing details into one .csv file (using excel or whatever) which they could then upload to all the co-operating listings sites in the club, saving them loads of time & also benefitting our sites by having more content, because the content providers have more time etc.

i’ve been meaning to email josh & jonny for ages to start the discussion on such a thing, but right now i’ve not even found time to send them the email, let alone actually implement anything which came out of it…

By: The Baron

The Baron — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:16:01 +0000

Hello…the Hearing Aid here…I’d be happy to share any of the rubbish that I write with anyone. If you want to copy and paste from my site, just go ahead. It’s all about the music. If anyone has a more sophisticated idea (maybe a written version of the Hype Machine for example)post your thoughts here.

Have a lovely weekend.
X

By: Mark Badger

Mark Badger — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:16:36 +0000

and there’s http://www.birminghammusicnetwork.com too