Comments on: Fanati[CAL]

By: darrell

darrell — Sun, 26 Dec 2004 21:25:25 +0000

Have you seen the rather lovely table about the relative sizes of various kinds of searchable data sources mentioned on Technology Review? Interesting in that it doesn’t include event data at all…

By: darrell

darrell — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 17:36:41 +0000

and i guess live feeds from stuff already happening, should anyone be into that… quite like the idea of the calendar day squares serving up thumbnails of video content… later later later

By: darrell

darrell — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 17:23:52 +0000

and also — the CDDB/IMDB model has the extra added coolness of appealing to fans who are passionate RIGHT ACROSS the bellcurve — which means you get a much wider range of events fed in than the listings magazines etc would ever see… in fact i suspect that going for the geeks, freaks and fringers first is a good strategy — getting the stuff in the centre of the bellcurve is easy, but a lot of the value will come from the collaborative filtering between the fringe and the ‘hump’

By: darrell

darrell — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 17:17:51 +0000

yep — that’s a pretty essential difference between a calendar-of-me service and pure hosting… and easy to see how you extract value both inside the system (directly for users) and outside it (for sponsotrs/advertisers etc)

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 16:21:40 +0000

indeed.
the cross-connections of calendars to other data sources has interesting collaborative aspects. eg lets say you have a film calendar where (unlike live performace) the “events” have probably already been reviewed by others in IMdb — you can get instant calendars for currently playing films that match your taste/needs.
or book channels with reviews databases that then could match live events (books released/authors speaking etc)
and then of course reviews of (live) events feed-back into the “static” reviews of authors/creators/films/books etc
feels like a hyperlinked event listing wherein the links are polled to generate a metric for YOU. bayesian filters.

By: darrell

darrell — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 09:28:16 +0000

yep — i’m thinking even a few more ways to slice it — raw calendar data relates to events — events can be not just POSTED but REVIEWED. So you can ,as a fan, get fame through being a good reviewer as well as a good REPORTER — the number of events to REPORT is finite, but the number of OPINIONS is infinite…

SO you could subscribe, say, to the ‘london new music channel, but only events performed by actors who have previously got a 5 star rating from a particular reviewer…

The three things i think missing from hte current crop of cal hosts are:

- understanding of the need to create a MARKET for this stuff: not a tehcnical challenge, its a business one and involves a brand and lots of PR

- understanding of the importance of collaborative filtering (all the stuff above)

- understanding of the importance of server-side aggregation and re-publication as part of thecollaborative filtering.

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 21:43:31 +0000

conceptually, you publish your events to ICdb (Internet Calendar database al la IMdb — though perhaps more of a virtual, distributed-store aggregator vs. IMdb centralized model) and that data is indexed by submiter (fan), calendar name, event types etc etc … you then set your own calendar to subscribe to ICdb based on various filtering criteria (rather than just subscribing to certian calendars). so lowpass filters needed to avoid feedback loops i guess.