Category Archives: Web 2.0

The Eventful Politics Project

Events, Politics, Web 2.0

I don’t usually blog about my work, not because it’s boring but because it tends to strike me as advertising. I guess I assume that you couldn’t possibly be as excited about the things I do as I am. (Don’t tell me if I’m right about that.)

Today, however, I saw something on Eventful that I just have to share: The Eventful Politics Project, started by Jed Sundwall and Alex Hunsucker. In their own words:

…while conservative bloggers blog for conservative readers and liberal bloggers blog for liberal readers, we hope that technology can serve to remind us that, as Thomas Jefferson said in his inaugural speech, “We are all Democrats, we are all Republicans!” There are millions of passionate voters in this country, voters with myriad concerns and needs that don’t necessarily fit in with either of the major party platforms.

We’re building a database of all event information in the world (yes, all). This means we’re sucking up info on conventions, town hall meetings, rallies, protests, meetups, house parties, etc. We’re doing this because we think the internet can—and should—make smaller events more discoverable. It’s a pursuit that parallels transparency. That is, we believe that there are tens of thousands of wholly public events that are essentially hidden from the public simply because there’s no simple place to find them…

The blog is worth a read, but the really impressive part is the site they’ve put together to answer the need. (I’d love to say “the site I put together,” but aside from the base technology I wasn’t involved.) With a few clicks you can discover that house party down the street you didn’t know was happening, demand that the politicians come to earn your vote, or invite the world to come to your Lefty Libertarians for Literacy meeting.

The proof, for me at least, was that on my very first view of the page I discovered three different things I’d like to be doing, none of which I would have known about otherwise. Hopefully you’ll find something similar.

Jed and Alex are hoping to make a mark on the 2008 election. They have quite a long road ahead of them, but the first steps are really exciting.

JoCo in San Diego!

Events, Fun, Music, Web 2.0

You may have noticed that little demand sticker on the sidebar here. I’ve been hoping to get Jonathan Coulton to visit our little cultural backwater for a while now, and he’s finally agreed! Details:

Who: Jonathan Coulton
When: Tuesday, 20 February at 8:00 pm
Where: House of Blues San Diego

Details at Eventful, of course. So there you have it. If you’re in San Diego that night and you like… stuff… you absolutely have to be there. I will!

tales from the mash pit

Making Stuff, Technology, Travel, Web 2.0

(Author’s note: Chris Messina implored us to blog about Mash Pit. I didn’t want to just parrot other excellent posts, so here’s my demented version of the event.)

Four thirty. A.M., as in oh-dark-thirty. Ben and Karen will be asleep for another three hours. Uh huh. Why am I up this early? Because I have to leave for the airport in an hour. Uh huh. Why is that again? It takes me a moment to focus, to remember. Oh yes. It’s because I go into berserker paroxysms of geeky hyperactivity whenever the triggerword API is spoken, and I don’t stop until some kind soul utters the safeword.

In this case the fiend is Chris Messina, and the cause of the utterance is Mash Pit. It’s the latest bud from the BarCamp bush, a one-day test to see if meatspace interaction can produce cyberspace results. If successful, a number of Mash Pits would follow, each building on the the code and content of the last. It’s in San Francisco, of course. I’m in San Diego, of course. “It’s not that far,” I think, glossing over the realities of security checkpoints, delays and AirBART. “The flight is barely as long as my old commute to Encinitas.” Uh huh.
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Predictions for 2006

Web 2.0

From a comment I posted over at Peter Caputa’s blog:

The Web 2.17 design ethic replaces tiny grey text and big colorful images with tiny grey images and big colorful text. Flickr repurposes itself as a freefont archive.

Yahoo, Google, O’Reilly, and Apple merge into a company briefly named YaGooFoople, then renamed Web 2.0, which manages to acquire Microsoft just before disappearing in a puff of smoke and stock options.

The US Government creates a new RSS Bankruptcy Court to provide citizens relief from crushing attention debt. Options include “Chapter 1.3-NonAttribution” bankruptcy and the more popular “Chapter 1.1-ShareAlike”, which provides debt restructuring across social networks.

Ha. I kill me.

taking web 2.0 up a notch

Web 2.0

Brian Dear just posted a ginormous, well-thought-out post on “where Eventful and EVDB fit in the Web 2.0 universe”:http://blog.eventful.com/archives/2005/10/a_reponse_to_ti.html. It’s primarily a response to Tim O’Reilly’s post asking “What is Web 2.0″:http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html but it’s also leading up to the “Web 2.0 conference”:http://eventful.com/events/E0-001-000179267-5 this week.

I love how well we fit in this new ecosystem. I consider that a good sign, both about the Web 2.0 concept (it’s not just a buzzword) and about EVDB itself. Like I’ve said before, it’s really refreshing to work on something that’s both on the cutting edge and well-received by the general public.

UPDATE: Tim O’Reilly posted a nice response to Brian’s response:

bq. Brian Dear’s wonderful point by point analysis of how EVDB matches up with the points in my Web 2.0 meme map. I’d love to see more Web 2.0 companies giving this kind of feedback!