It is very easy to get an impression that events are nothing more than scribbles in calendars. At least that is the impression one gets when looking at sites that are supposedly related to events on the Web. Sites like Eventful and upcoming are good sites for calendars and are steps in a right direction, at least that’s what appears from what I know, for collecting more events to mark calendars. And these event calendars definitely have a role in the first order planning. They do provide time registered listing of events.
Events, however, are significantly more important in our life. ANd much of their importance is due to the experiences and detailed information associated with events. And that is true for past events, current events, and future events. All news, all history, all novels, all videos, photographs, recordings, and similar artifacts are to capture and replay experiences related to events — in some cases synthetic experiences of virtual events. People spend hours watching highlights of sports, videos of their own wedding, reading all stories about important events, and listening to voices of their loved ones. These experiences are integral part of the past events. For the current events, people want to experience them live. Let’s not forget how much effort media people spend to bring videos, pictures, and phone stories about important events for providing us remote live experience of those events. Similarly, for future events, an important part of creating buzz is to provide a glimpse of the experience that you would have at the event. Even tourism industry exploits that. Movie industry tries to provide a glimpse of those experiences.
Currently the Web is extremely poor in bringing us events. All information on the web is organized in terms of objects. Event the news sites use keyword based search techniques to provide us exploration of events. And the event sites that are trying to bring events to us are in their very early infancy. And these sites are exclusively focused on populating calendars. These sites don’t even think of experiences associated with events. If you know sites that are powerful in bringing event experiences (not just news sites organized around keywords), I would like to know.
Events are experiences. By making them a dot on a calendar, we take out the life and leave a highest level of abstraction required for simple planning there.
At the Web2.0 conference, Yahoo labs had a demo called TagLine, that data mined Flickr tags to find bursty tags – tags that seem to shoot up in popularity very fast. They had a demo that showed a timeline with the tags floating around the dates when they were popular – many of them related to important events. Clicking on any tag showed pictures related to that event..The demo doesn’t seem to be available over the web..
I wish I had seen that demo.
The new site by Yahoo on events may be a step in that direction.