August 18, 2007

The Stories Behind the Stories

Couple times lately I've seen comments in blogs, on YouTube, and elsewhere, and I've heard occasional feedback from random people at conferences expressing skepticism that the news reports on Eventful that aired on Wolf Blitzer's CNN program Situation Room (see here and here) surely must have been prepared by or even paid for by Eventful. Likewise, I've gotten feedback that Eventful's Eventful Politics initiative seems biased towards the Democratic Party candidates (for example, the John Edwards competition).

This blog post is intended to set the record straight, with the stories behind these stories. It's important that people understand that as a company we are taking a very firm stand at neutrality and impartiality, building and supporting a technology platform that all can benefit from. Likewise, when it comes to news reports, believe me, the news organizations call the shots with their stories.

Let's take the CNN case first.

How'd it come about?

First, a digression. I can't help but be reminded by Woody Allen's famous quote, that "eighty percent of success is showing up." It may have been a simple offhand joke for Woody, but since the very founding day of Eventful back in 2004, I have found that quote to be amazingly true. Showing up, time after time after time, was what got the company funded. Showing up was how we got great people to join the team. Showing up got deals closed. Showing up at conferences, particularly to exhibit and/or participate in a keynote or panel session, has always led to good things happening.

Such was the case when a contingent of Eventful folks converged at the Personal Democracy Forum conference back in May. I was sick as a dog that week, and was in no condition to be walking the streets of New York City let alone speaking at the conference. We had a booth in the PDF exhibit hall, where Tim Breidigan and Jed Sundwall did an awesome job of answering questions and doing demos all day long. Booth duty is exhausting work and I was amazed at their energy and enthusiasm.

At one point while I was hanging around the booth during a break from the conference sessions, a woman approached and inquired about Eventful and what we were doing with politics. She introduced herself as Abbi Tatton, a reporter from CNN's Situation Room show with Wolf Blitzer. She asked a lot of great questions, and said she was thinking of doing a segment on Eventful. Cool!

Now, when a startup company sticks in the game long enough to create some buzz, the media starts waking up and checking you out. By May 2007, we were getting a good share of buzz and the corresponding mainstream media inquiries, including major print and television outlets who'd tell our PR firm they were considering a story and wanting to do interviews. You quickly learn not to get too excited about the media attention for, as Yogi Berra might have said, "it didn't air on TV until you can play the clip on YouTube." So many times the reporter you've done this great interview with will be suddenly pulled off the story, or the producer will have to table the project because another unrelated story just turned urgent, or something else will get in the way and suddenly that major print or broadcast feature about Eventful you were looking forward to seeing isn't happening after all. And then a day goes by, and suddenly another fantastic opportunity opens up and you move on to pursue the new opportunity. So it goes.

So when a CNN reporter stopped by our exhibit booth at PDF on May 18th, we were excited, for sure. But reporters from lots of other news organizations had stopped by that day. Like we'd done with everyone, we did our best to help answer her questions, walk her through a demo of the site, suggest some story angle ideas for her and Wolf Blitzer to consider, and then we said our thank yous and goodbyes and that was that. Maybe there'd be something to air on TV, maybe there wouldn't. You just never know.

Not two weeks later, on May 29th, our PR firm excitedly contacted us to let us know that they'd heard from CNN that we were indeed going to be on Wolf Blitzer's show, that same day! We found out when the segment was due to air, and a bunch of folks at the office dashed off to the gymnasium downstairs in our building, as it happens to have a TV connected to cable, and they were able to watch the segment live.

We couldn't believe how good the ninety-two second segment was. Blitzer and Tatton did a great job accurately describing Eventful in brief sound bites, along with how the 2008 presidential candidates were using the service to invite their supporters to "demand" them to come to their towns for rallies and speeches. In 92 seconds they succinctly got the message out better than we probably could have. And it was all their own reporting. Personally, I was amazed at how good it was. It was a great day for Eventful.

Woody Allen was right.

But more good was to come out of our participation at the PDF conference. On July 17th, Blitzer and Tatton were back with a yet another segment about Eventful Politics, this time specifically covering the news about John Edwards' "Demand and Be Heard" competition which was due to wrap up within 24 hours, with the winning city likely to be tiny Columbus, Kentucky. Now, our PR firm had stayed in touch with Tatton who has been genuinely interested in tracking what Eventful's been doing in the politics arena. This was another great segment that succinctly put together, in ninety-five seconds, the whole John Edwards competition story, including how Columbus, Kentucky got into the lead thanks to the hard work of one Shawn Dixon.

Which leads to the next issue: that Eventful's politics initiative does too much with Democrats and not enough with Republicans (not to mention other parties). I heard this the other night at a dinner party: how come you're working so much with the Democrats and not the Republicans?

This one is easy to address. We've reached out to everyone equally, in keeping with our mission to strictly stay impartial and encourage everyone to get involved and use these tools. In general, I believe it's safe to say the Democratic side has to date been more active on the Net. I could be wrong, but that is my simple take. Not just with Eventful, but with all of the various web services out there including blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Perhaps it's due to the head start the Democrats gained thanks to the efforts taken back in 2003-2004 by the Howard Dean campaign, who made history with his aggressive use of the Net and support of the "netroots". It seems like ancient history now, but it was only a few short years ago.

But the Net is far enough along now that political campaigns from all parties realize that using the Net is key to winning office. And I fully expect to see much more activity from the Republican campaigns in the coming months. I hope to see more activity from Democrats too. Indeed, it'd be awesome to see independents and third-party candidates get involved.

When Eventfullers Alex Hunsucker and Jed Sundwall originally pitched the Eventful Politics project back in late 2006, we all thought it was a great idea. We would go aggregate every politics-related event we could find, happening at the local, state, and national level across the entire U.S. We'd index all of the members of Congress, making each of them "performers" in our Performers database. We'd even index the daily hearings and other events on Capitol Hill. And, of course, we'd enable people everywhere to "demand" that a political figure come to their town to give a lecture, or participate in a debate or rally. One rule we all agreed on right up front: Eventful would remain neutral, and our mission would be to offer our technology platform to all citizens of the U.S. to discover, share, track, and demand political events regardless of political affiliation. Alex and Jed made up a list of conferences we should participate in, and they set out to contact all of the 2008 presidential campaigns and see if they were interested in sharing their event data and participating in Eventful Demand. The first conference Eventful attended was CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, held in Washington DC earlier this year. We had a booth and spent a lot of time meeting with conservative political operatives, pundits, supporters, and a few candidates and elected officials. Next up, PDF. Most recently, YearlyKos. We've done a bunch of conferences now, and established relationships with all of the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns.

As you might expect, each campaign has their own strategy, priorities, and timing, particularly when it comes to Internet initiatives. So far, with the exception of Republican candidate Ron Paul, the Democratic candidates have been quicker at adopting Eventful's tools to connect to supporters. Again, I suspect this traces back to the Dean activity in 2003-2004.

It's been remarkable is how fast Eventful has become one of the key Internet tools for many of the campaigns. So far, we've seen more of the Democratic candidates use Eventful for specific campaign initiatives, most notably John Edwards' "Demand and Be Heard" competition (we look forward to seeing him actually go out to meet the people of Columbus, Kentucky -- hopefully that will be soon!). Most amazing with Edwards, at least for me personally, was the video he and his staff prepared for the competition. The video began with a black page with white titles showing "Senator John Edwards", with "Eventful.com" appearing below that. And then there he was, wearing a light blue T-shirt, sitting in the corner of some room, surrounded by walls of maps, talking clearly and succinctly about the "Demand and Be Heard" competition. I think it's safe to say everyone at Eventful was blown away by the video. We'd suggested to the Edwards campaign that it'd be great if they could do a video, but we weren't sure they'd have the time to put it together. The result was all their own work, presumably produced at campaign headquarters in faraway North Carolina, and when they sent it to us to put on the site, that was the first time we'd seen it.

So, going back to the question submitted to me at a recent dinner party, where's the Republican activity? Well, for one, the Ron Paul campaign staff has been quite active, not to mention his supporters, who have been amazingly busy at a grass-roots level, catapulting Ron Paul to the top of the Demand charts for Republican candidates.

But what about a Romney competition? To which we of course say, fantastic, let's do it! And Giuliani? Same thing. And same for McCain, Thompson, Huckabee, Brownback, Tancredo, and any other candidate anyone's in favor of. There are demands underway for all of those candidates, and we'd be delighted to see any and all of them use Eventful's tools in any way they and their campaigns see fit to reach out and connect to their supporters. Any candidate is welcome to do their own "Demand and Be Heard" initiative or something else. Indeed, if you're a supporter for one of these candidates, or any of the Democratic candidates, or candidates of any party, the first thing to do is always join or start a demand for the candidate to come to your city, and then get in touch with the candidate's campaign and let them know you're demanding them and that you'd like them to help alert their supporters at the national level, so everyone's demanding their favorite candidate. And while you're at it, if you know of any political events in your area that are not listed on Eventful, well, add 'em!

The Eventful Politics initiative has so far wildly exceeded our expectations, and we still have many months to go before the 2008 presidential election. What's more, we're starting to see 2008 senatorial campaigns begin to embrace Eventful. It's my hope that by this time next year, all candidates have used Eventful in a significant way, and have found that it has helped them connect to their supporters around the country. It's also my hope that lots of people around the country will have discovered, through Eventful, intriguing local political events that they might have otherwise never known about. We love the idea of a tremendously well-informed populace, and if we help even a tiny bit with the tools we've built at Eventful to get closer to that goal, then we'll keep going. We invite you to participate!

December 12, 2006

Best Records of 2006 & the Best Events of the Future!

NPR's All Songs Considered broadcast their Best Music of 2006 list last Wednesday. You can listen to it at All Songs Considered's website (subscribe to their podcast while you're there).

In Wednesday's program, ASC host, Bob Boilen, made the observation that his listeners voted for an unprecedented variety of artists and genres when choosing this year's best album. He wondered aloud if the increase in variety of music embraced by his listeners had any relation to this year's demise of Tower Records.

None of his guests were willing to say one way or another, but I'll take a stab at it. My answer is "yes."

I'd guess that today's broader music tastes and Tower's demise both have to do with the way the internet has allowed musicians to overcome the barriers presented by "traditional" music distribution channels.

It's like this: CDs take up music stores' shelf space. CDs that fail to sell essentially fail to justify their placement in the store. It's as if they weren't paying the rent for their shelf space, so they get evicted. This demands that music retailers focus on stuff that's guaranteed to sell. It makes things hard for retailers serving customers with a widening variety of tastes.

Now, an internet full of blogs and mp3s and online music stores has allowed people to discover artists that they'd rarely encounter on the shelves of their local record shop. (I could further explain how this has happened, but its best explained in Chris Anderson's The Long Tail) Looking for something new to feed your ears no longer requires leaving your house. It's awesome, but bitterawesome.

When I was a wee lad intent on collecting every single Chemical Brothers single I could get my hands on, I knew exactly where to get them: Tower's shelves of imports. When I studied at the University of Utah, I had to force myself to steer clear of Salt City CDs (R.I.P.) because it was one of those magical music joints that you couldn't enter without leaving with a handful of life-changing CDs.

I'm sad that those places don't exist anymore. Going to them was special. Discovering music back then was an (*ahem*) event.

And here's my point. My name's Jed, and I'm new here at Eventful. I came here because I love music. I love discovering music, and I love finding places to discover new music. I'm here because I want to make sure that Eventful makes it easier to discover what music's playing outside, away from the internet.

I'm here because technology has brought a greater variety of music into our lives, and it should bring a greater variety of events too. Watch this blog for tips and news about how Eventful can make this a reality.

October 03, 2005

A Reponse to Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Article

Tim O'Reilly's written an excellent piece attempting to define, once and for all, what the notion of "Web 2.0" means.

One very interesting illustration (click link or photo to see full-size), the Web 2.0 "meme map", accompanies the first page of Tim's article. It illustrates what was captured in a session on Web2.0 at the recent FooCamp conference. As Tim says, "It's very much a work in progress, but shows the many ideas that radiate out from the Web 2.0 core."

It is the items, or memes, as it were, on this "meme map", that I'd like to talk about. Specifically, how EVDB as a company views each meme, and how EVDB as a technology, and Eventful as a service, embody those memes.

Let's just go straight down the list, starting from the orange "core", then the green memes, and finally the tan memes.

• Strategic Positioning: The Web as Platform
  Bottom line, this is why I founded EVDB. I was tired of not knowing about lots of events going on nearby, and I thought that a bunch of interesting technologies used on the web were maturing to the point that it was time to build an event index on top of those technologies. By having the core engine plugged directly into the web, all kinds of compelling and useful applications could be built on top of the platform: desktop, browser-based, and mobile apps included. What better way of aiding discovery of events, then to build enabling technology that gets the word out to as many people as possible through as many ways as possible?
• User Positioning: You Control Your Own Data
  What you do with the events you find (what calendars you store them in, for instance), is up to you. If you decide you don't like to store them in a calendar on Eventful, then you ought to be able to move your calendar to some other service.
• Core Competencies: Services, not packaged software
  Everything we're building at EVDB, including the new Eventful site, is a service. Much as we'd love to burn CDs and place them in beautifully-packaged boxes a la Apple, our core competency is to build an excellent platform, with all kinds of connectivity through our API tools, and enable others (maybe even you, dear reader) to go off and build that beautiful packaged software that helps users discover, contribute, and share events in compelling and beneficial ways.
• Core Competencies: Architecture of Participation
  The web is about people, not documents, or programs, or data. It's about people. A web service serves people in the end. How do they benefit? How does the service enable discovery? Contribution? Participation? Sharing? It's what it's all about.
• Core Competencies: Cost-effective Scalability
  Commodity-cheap, fast computers running open-source stacks: Linux, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Perl/PHP. Build things from scratch with scalability right in the DNA of everything you do. After all, there are a lot of people. And a successful web service is one that a lot of people find useful. Scale, or bail.
• Core Competencies: Remixable data source and data transformations
  Post an event on Eventful, and you get the event in the EVDB index, plus on Eventful where people can find it, plus as an ICalendar file that you can add to your own calendars elsewhere or share with friends, plus as an RSS feed that likewise you can subscribe to or share with friends. With the API, developers can "mash up" the data and mix with other web services APIs. Our users have already created three interesting mashups: Eve, evMapper, and BlogMap. More cool mashups are coming.
• Core Competencies: Software above the level of a single device
  This gets back to the notion of services and platform. We're building out the EVDB system as an open platform through which data flows back and forth to and from applications and potentially millions of other servers around the web. And the applications may be running on your mobile phone, your PDA, your desktop machine, your iPod, in your car, on an airplane... all over the place. The information needs to find you, wherever you are. And you need to be able to get the information, wherever you are.
• Core Competencies: Harnessing collective intelligence
  Somenoe out there knows the answer. Give people the tools to join in on the conversation, so everyone gets the answer. If the information's wrong or incomplete, let people correct it, or at least call out the error and recommend a correction. If the information's misleading or abusive, let people flag it as such. If there's a way to help more people discover some information, let people tag the information with useful descriptors.

And now for the green bubbles...

• Flickr, del.icio.us (, Eventful!): Tagging, not taxonomy
  Taxonomies are actually useful. Taxonomies based on -- that emerge out of -- tagging are wonderful. On Eventful, everything's taggable. Events, venues, calendars... and more to come.

• Gmail, Google Maps, and AJAX: Rich User Experiences
  The "wealth" of a user experience comes not from the shininess of the chrome, or the novelty of the interface, but from how readily the system gets people communicating: discovering, contributing, and sharing information. In our case, discovering, contributing, and sharing events. The Eventful web site uses AJAX techniques all over the place. But we try not to make a big deal about it. We don't believe the reason to use Eventful is to admire its use of AJAX. That would be like admiring iTunes because of its use of Objective-C. I guess I'm old-fashioned, and believe that the best user interface is one that is invisible because the user is focused on the task at hand; the information is readily available; and there's a sense that there are people everywhere and you're not alone. It all boils down to success: when you use a system, are you successful? Are you able to do what you set out to do? Are you able to find what you set out to find? Did you discover relevant and interesting things you didn't expect to discover? That's a rich user experience. If AJAX helps bring it about, fine.

• PageRank, eBay reputation, Amazon reviews: user as contributor
  For participation to flourish, a system needs to the trust of the community: is what I'm seeing legit? How do I get recognized for my contributions? How does a system evaluate my contributions in such a way as to enable me to rise in the community as a thought-leader and expert? We want to do more here as our Eventful user community grows.

• Blogs: Participation, not publishing
  Funnily enough, the original EVDB service was envisioned as a blog of events, not, as Tim thinks, as a huge calendar of events. Today's Eventful service is still at its core, a big huge blog of events. Each event is a blog post. Each post has a title, a time stamp, and author (i.e., contributor), a set of tags, plus optional comments, trackbacks, and even shared bookmarks. It's a blog of events all right. In fact if you go to your own blog and post something about an event on Eventful, and you reference the Eventful URL for that event, as long as your blog software knows how to track back (and most apps do), we'll get "pinged" and we'll mark up the event as having been mentioned on your blog.,
• Wikipedia: Radical Trust
  I think it's a myth that Wikipedia is completely open. Ever tried posting something there? Ever had the Wikisquads pop out of the woodwork and shoot down your contribution before you've even finished typing it? My personal opinion is that Wikipedia is more about "radical" than "trust," and that there is still too much control. Control is okay if you make it clear to the contributors how things will work, and what the workflow will be. Right now on Wikipedia it's all a surprise, at least, that's been my experience. Now. All that said, the concept of "radical trust" is right on. It's a necessary ingredient to making things work on a large scale: getting lots and lots of people to buy into an idea and starting to use it to the point of relying on it. Events are a special case: unlike Wikipedia which is about encyclopedia articles designed to become part of the ongoing culture and history, events come and go like the blink of an eye. The potential for abuse is huge with events. Abuse in the sense of misleading people about the who, what, when, and where details of an event. In Eventful, people can build SmartCalendars that let you be notified of events that haven't even come on the radar yet -- events that match your search criteria and that you want to know about as soon as they're announced. Well, what happens if those events contain intentionally false information? We need to build a system that trusts the community, but offers safeguards so that people can safely rely on the information they're getting from the community.
• BitTorrent: Radical Decentralization
  We think this is a key for events to really take off on the web. Take off in the sense of being discoverable by everyone. A little museum in Tierra del Fuego ought to be able to publish its events and make them just as readily discoverable as the Smithsonian or the Louvre. To me, the Web2.0-ification (eek!) of events means not building a proprietary index of event data and then building walls around it (sounds very web1.0 to me) but rather, enabling anyone who has events to share to have tools to get those events out and onto the radars of everyone and anyone who cares. The blog world offers lots of inspiration for how events can become more discoverable: look at how blog posts have become discoverable thanks to RSS, and ping servers, and services like Technorati. The same can work in the event world.

And finally, the tan bubbles:

• "An attitude, not a technology"
  I prefer the term "mindset" to "attitude," but that's just me. In my opinion, the mindset is this: you have to give to receive, and for a long while you may be giving before you start receiving at all. You have to build a place that people will feel comfortable participating in. You have to build a place that you, most of all, want to spend a lot of time in. You have to build a service, I believe, that you want to be the first user of, contributor to, participant in. It all boils down to a people mindset: build your service for people, make it as useful and beneficial for people as possible, enable individuals and groups to form relationships through your system. And, in the end, the links you make are equal to the links you take.

• The Long Tail
  When it comes to events, EVDB and our Eventful service are all about enabling discovery of the whole long tail of events: not just the 100,000+ crowds at the U2 concert, but the fourteen fans who show up at a tiny independent bookstore to see their favorite mystery novelist read and sign from her latest book. As for the term "Long Tail," it's all been said. These days I prefer Paul Kedrosky's term: the dark matter of the internet -- information yet to be discovered and to date, unreachable through a browser. The dark matter of the event universe is incredibly vast: not even Google is going to be able to index it, because most of it is not online to index. Nor is it even in print in a library. It's floating around the SMS-sphere. It's stuck on the bulletin board next to the elevator in the Engineering department of the university. It's on the whiteboard in the lunchroom at work. It's all over.

• Data as the "Intel Inside"
  Tim posits, in italics even, that "the race is on to own certain classes of core data". He lists several of these "certain classes": "location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces." The "E" in EVDB means "Events" and the "V" in EVDB means "Venues" as in "locations". Tim then even mentions us, saying, "In the area of calendaring, EVDB is an attempt to build the world's largest shared calendar via a wiki-style architecture of participation." Two main comments. First, I disagree with the notion of data being the "Intel Inside". Data is the "Micron Technology inside". In a web2.0 world, it's not the data, it's the engine that operates on that data. Intel is the engine, the CPU. Not the data, the RAM. How good is your engine? How smart is it? How hackable is it? How customizable is it? How ubiquitous is it? Example: In the world of web mapping, we've all seen the ubiquitous "Navteq" copyright notices on maps, even on Google's maps. That's the data. Navteq is the leader in mapping data. But it's not the engine. No, the engine is Telcontar. Never heard of 'em? Well, they're the engine that operates on the Navteq data and they're a major component of Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, MapQuest... (hmm, I sense a pattern there). Second, EVDB is not "an attempt to build the world's largest shared calendar," at least, not how Tim's thinking. On the contrary: EVDB is an attempt to turn the web into the world's largest shared calendar. There's a difference.
• Hackability
  Three letters: API. Hack away. Build something useful. Let everyone know.
• The Perpetual beta
  Is there any other way? A system that's responding to its user community, and that gets to the point where the user community is the system, is one that is in a constant, permanent state of flux.
• The Right to Remix: "Some rights reserved"
  API, RSS, iCalendar. Remix away.
• Software that gets better the more people use it
  Indeed. This is the benefit of an architecture of participation. And hopefully, people get smarter because more people use the software. In the sense that they're more aware of what's going on, right in their backyards, right down the street, somewhere right in town. All kinds of interesting things going on. Enjoy life. Go to events more often.
• Emergent User behavior not predetermined
  One good reason for "perpetual beta": you never know what users will want next, and in my book The User Is Always Right. So a Web2.0 system is in a constant state of flux. Some features may come and go, but the core will keep getting better, to support the shifting and growing needs of the user community.
• Play
  Any technology system that enables people to interact and communicate is only as good as its ability to let people be people.
• Granular Addressability of content
  In the EVDB architecture, every event, every venue, and every calendar has a unique identifier, a UPC code, if you will. And every piece of data about the event, venue, or calendar, is individually addressable through our API.
• Rich User Experience
  Already addressed above.
• Small pieces Loosely Joined
  Actually, some big pieces too, among the many small pieces. In the world of EVDB, what are the small and big pieces? The small pieces are the events and calendars of events that reside all over the web: not just within the EVDB index, or on the Eventful website, but on your website, and yours, and yours over there. The big pieces are servers: not just EVDB's, but all kinds of servers all over the web, all with open connectivity, all able to share and exchange event data with other servers. This is only in its infancy on the web right now. We aim to change that.
• Trust your users
  After all, they're trusting you by showing up and participating. We do our best to listen and respond as fast as we can. We can always do better. We need to build a system that makes the community feel at home: this is a place we can hang out. This is a place where interesting people come. This is a place where I can find out all kinds of interesting things!. This is a place where it's fun to share my own findings with others. That's what we're building.