Tourb.us v. Upcoming.org
I think that I’d seen Tourb.us before, but Fred Wilson went ga-ga about it on Saturday, so I’m giving it the once-over. Fred’s comment that it “requires no work” is true if you’re a passive user, I guess; my initial look is that 90% of the shows that I attend aren’t in there. Of course, the only reason that most of the shows I attend are listed online outside of the artists’ pages are because, well, I put them there. [To be fair, it's me, Brad, and Shane. Fellas, you guys rock for helping shoulder the load!]
It’s work for someone to get the data in there, even if they have an open API for adding stuff. Why? Even open APIs require a programmer to hook them up, and few bands outside the major label guys have people that do that kind of thing. [Trust me ... I want to do a collaborative artist calendar that pushes data at Upcoming and whoever else ... but I am not a programmer, and I'm not going to push the idea on Jeff at all.]
Hey Geof, wanted to follow up on your post. With tourb.us, we’re taking a hybrid approach to collecting shows. We automatically aggregate shows from a number of sites (focusing on a number of major cities), and also gratefully accept shows that are added by fans, bands, clubs, labels, etc. Currently we don’t aggregate anything in your area (Alabama, right?), so it would be up to fans/bands to add shows, and tell us of good venues/sites to crawl. I can understand not wanting to do this both in tourb.us and upcoming, and while I’d love to see an easy way to push them to many services, it’s not simple yet (although microformats offer a glimmer of hope). Sorry I don’t have a better answer right now…
September 5th, 2006 at 12:50Mike: Yes, I’m in Alabama. However, a lot of the shows I’m hitting are in Nashville [although you're excused for overlooking them, as none are high-profile
].
I’m actually going to work up a workflow where I update both sites with the data I have. It may seem silly, but I have a purposes for doing it: data redundancy, user choice [some folks will want to use Tour.bus, some Upcoming, and it's not up to me to choose that for them], and others that I’m not thinking of as people keep popping in and out of my office.
Here’s two suggestions for you [which you may have already implemented]: open up an API for inputs, and scrape MySpace. So many independent artists put their dates there now that it’s crazy, and those folks are looking for free pub. If you scrape and grab dates from there and do a good job of letting indies know about Tourb.us, they’re going to direct traffic to you.
September 5th, 2006 at 12:55haha… I really want to see it happen, too! Unfortunately, I’m not sure the technology or my know-how (or free time) are there just quite yet.
September 6th, 2006 at 15:14Jeff, I feel guilty for having even written that.
September 6th, 2006 at 16:14