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That’s the first thing I thought after going through the linked article. We strongly need some aggregating tool for all events happening around a particular loc

That’s the first thing I thought after going through the linked article. We strongly need some aggregating tool for all events happening around a particular location.

davidy123 7y ago
No, and looking for tools (or Portals as they are groaningly called) is where the Web went wrong. We need strongly aggregatable data, not a tool. In fact this data format already exists in schema.org, which is an open, community-driven effort by Google, Bing, Yandex and others. https://schema.org/Event https://schema.org/Event schema.org is used by about a third of web sites to allow them to be self contained but make their information discoverable and reusable in a precise way, and it is the skeleton of the much-promised semantic web. The main factors working against it are Facebook and Amazon, who have enough mass and selfishness to want to be self-contained worlds. That is the only reasonable way to "decentralize" this data so anyone can use it. Add your recognized sites once (or perhaps have a recurring crawl) and anyone can have their own feed of events, just like RSS. It's just that developers and startups don't like the boring work of following standards, they'd rather build a tool. [edited to add details about schema.org]
- sitkack 7y ago
  It is called RSS with microformats and this is exactly where the web was in what, 2003/5? Part of censuring Big Tech should be forcing them to adopt open standards, XMPP, RSS, Microformats, etc. http://microformats.org/wiki/RSS http://microformats.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat
  - greggman2 7y ago
    > Schema.org vocabularies are developed by an open community process, using the public-schemaorg@w3.org mailing list and through GitHub.
- greggman2 7y ago
  It would be great to have all this data but... It's not sufficient because anyone can post anything so it becomes a magnet for scammers. One, they'll make up events for non-events like just listing their bar exists. They'll also fill out fake schemas just for SEO, example fill out an event "Viagra cheap!" Of course I guess that's no different than crawling the web. Just saying that even with the data itself you need some serious spam detection to make it useful.
caseysoftware 7y ago
I've been aggregating data from Meetup and many other sources for years: http://techeventsnetwork.com/cities/ http://techeventsnetwork.com/cities/ and then pipe it into city-specific Twitter accounts: https://twitter.com/CaseySoftware/lists/tech-events-network/members https://twitter.com/CaseySoftware/lists/tech-events-network/... It's only tech events in the US but a fairly exhaustive list.

That’s the first thing I thought after going through the linked article. We strongly need some aggregating tool for all events happening around a particular location.

davidy123 7y ago

No, and looking for tools (or Portals as they are groaningly called) is where the Web went wrong. We need strongly aggregatable data, not a tool. In fact this data format already exists in schema.org, which is an open, community-driven effort by Google, Bing, Yandex and others. https://schema.org/Event https://schema.org/Event schema.org is used by about a third of web sites to allow them to be self contained but make their information discoverable and reusable in a precise way, and it is the skeleton of the much-promised semantic web. The main factors working against it are Facebook and Amazon, who have enough mass and selfishness to want to be self-contained worlds. That is the only reasonable way to "decentralize" this data so anyone can use it. Add your recognized sites once (or perhaps have a recurring crawl) and anyone can have their own feed of events, just like RSS. It's just that developers and startups don't like the boring work of following standards, they'd rather build a tool. [edited to add details about schema.org]

sitkack 7y ago
It is called RSS with microformats and this is exactly where the web was in what, 2003/5? Part of censuring Big Tech should be forcing them to adopt open standards, XMPP, RSS, Microformats, etc. http://microformats.org/wiki/RSS http://microformats.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat
- greggman2 7y ago
  > Schema.org vocabularies are developed by an open community process, using the public-schemaorg@w3.org mailing list and through GitHub.
greggman2 7y ago
It would be great to have all this data but... It's not sufficient because anyone can post anything so it becomes a magnet for scammers. One, they'll make up events for non-events like just listing their bar exists. They'll also fill out fake schemas just for SEO, example fill out an event "Viagra cheap!" Of course I guess that's no different than crawling the web. Just saying that even with the data itself you need some serious spam detection to make it useful.

caseysoftware 7y ago

I've been aggregating data from Meetup and many other sources for years: http://techeventsnetwork.com/cities/ http://techeventsnetwork.com/cities/ and then pipe it into city-specific Twitter accounts: https://twitter.com/CaseySoftware/lists/tech-events-network/members https://twitter.com/CaseySoftware/lists/tech-events-network/... It's only tech events in the US but a fairly exhaustive list.