The events listings site What’s On In Brum has had an overhaul so I had a quick look. The listings are pretty normal, allowing you to search by day and type and to see what’s happening right now across a range of areas. The Venue Guide is pretty slick, giving you an aggregation based on information put in by promoters along with a Google Map. It’s nice to see some Facebook integration although it only adds links to the site on your profile rather than events to your calendar. A bit more work needed there but it’s a start. Hopefully adoption of the iCalendar data exchange standard (meaning you can add info to your own calendar with one click) is in the offing. THSH and Facebook themselves offer this and once you start using it it’s very useful.
No RSS. At all. C’mon, this is 2007 people. Gimme a custom feed based on search terms please!
A really nice feature is the Flyer Wall which runs down the side of each page. Hovering over the listings shows you a flyer and clicking through lets you effectively download it for your own use. I can see this being very useful for my own gig listings blog and anything that enables people to share the knowledge is a good thing.
There’s no indication who’s behind this other than the fact that promoters who have a TheTicketSellers.co.uk account can sign in with the same details implying there’s some cross-ownership here. This might not seem a big deal for a consumer-facing site but if they want to build up relationships with the wide range of promoters in the city then answering the “who the hell are you?” question would be a good idea. Needless to say I think some kind of blog would be good for this.
On the whole the site, while not that revolutionary, looks much better and appears to work well. What concerns me though isn’t particularly specific to What’s On In Brum but to the whole events listings industry where the onus is on the promoter to input the same information into numerous sites. Given the iCalendar standard is pretty well established it should be easy to have promoters put their information in one place and have the sites subscribe to it ala RSS? Or am I living in a tech utopia?
Flyer Wall is pretty good, nice to see a bit of a change actually, events sites seem to roll into one these days.
I can’t believe RSS is missing. Some Microformat support (which requires no additional coding, just changes) would be nice as well.
ps, your venue guide link is dead.
(Link fixed. What would I do without you…)
“Given the iCalendar standard is pretty well established it should be easy to have promoters put their information in one place and have the sites subscribe to it ala RSS”
Events are not necessarily quite as standard as you would first imagine. Take for instance a typical concert performance (1 night only) versus a run of dates at a theatre, versus an art exhibition, versus a tour (same show, different venues).
You are right though, the iCal format has much of the info required to support the raw information, if not the marketing and copy function (video preview via iCal?). Perhaps this could be done via a standardised url/fragment or XML microformat enclosure within the description.
That said, I can’t believe that venues and promoters will continue to roll-out their own event and/or ticketing systems, or journos to hand-compile their event listings in the years to come. There’s a real need for a centralised system; the iTunes store for events. Particularly as most big-vendor online ticketing systems ,frankly, suck.
upcoming.org was the obvious contender up until about six months ago, but like everything else on the Internet it’s coming under major fire from Facebook.
Thanks for checking out the site Pete. Comments have been taken on board. There’s a short bit about who’s behind it on the ‘Contact Us’ page and XML feeds will be available soon.
I agree with the ideal situation of event organisers only having to enter their event details in one place and this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The woib site used to automatically add any events added to upcoming.org and evdb but the api for upcoming changed and i’ve never got around to trying to sort it.
The main problem with having a central event adding place is that all events websites will have the same information and what’s the point in that? The biggest attraction of woib is the large amount of events listed.
I suppose if everyone had access to a huge database of events the focus would move to how well the information is used.
“all events websites will have the same information and what’s the point in that?”
Venues and promoters would be able to apply filters to get back only their events for their own websites.
Most events organisations really don’t have the database skills to run their own events databases (just as most training providers don’t have the database skills to run their own course databases). Even if they were to use another service (in the vein of upcoming) and then syndicate [just] their own stuff back it would be a leap forward for many venues and promoters.