Web 2.0 For Events: Aggregating Content Around Events

I've been pleasantly surprised at the number of people that have had their interest piqued by these two posts.  Those posts talk about my vision for Web 2.0 for events. One where we are talking languages that the rest of the world understands. We're not talking micro-formats. We're not talking who can get the biggest pile of events. We're talking about leveraging events to build community.

And as we are about to launch our new site, with a brand spanking blogudio-designed home page, I can see that we aren't too far away from that vision. Especially, given all of the smart people that I've been talking to lately, that buy into this concept.



Here's some more about it....

Take a look at what Technorati is doing for live 8: They are aggregating content around an event.  Imagine... combining that with WhizSpark capabilities. We can create a template for a Sunday football game and let 50 sport's bar owners use it to organize Sunday night 2 dollar draft parties at their bar. Then, we can aggregate content from around the web or locally to determine what local bloggers are saying about the Patriots (or the local bar). We can aggregate photos from flickr so people can see who went last week. We can aggregate bookmarks from del.icio.us and spurl to see what everyone is reading and liking. We can aggregate podcasts from local radio stations commenting on the game. 

Now think of all of the events that are happening. And then realize that events are ALWAYS happening. There are always events. New ones. You want to create a Digital Lifestyle Aggregator (DLA) and aggregate content around people? You want to be an SEO spammer (not all SEO people are spammers) and aggregate content around a topic and republish it to a blog?  You'll quickly run out of things to aggregate. Or people to sign up and do it. And you also won't add a whole lot of value to the world by adding 1+1 = 2 (or -2 in the case of content remixing blog spammers). But, events provide a steady supply of  OBJECTS (for lack of a better word) to aggregate stuff around. And by adding 1 (photos) + 1 (blog posts) + 1 (podcasts) you get COMMUNITY and relevant timely locally produced, filtered and distributed content, which is much bigger than 3. Of course.

Create a site for the Olympics and aggregate what everyone is saying around it, pictures people are taking, etc. Create the unofficial (or official) site for the event, and benefit from its buzz. Do the same thing for every football and baseball game that happens. Or concert. Or nightclub. Or seminar. Or conference.  Now, we're on to something.

Who wants to build this with us?

Did I mention we have a revenue stream for this? One other than advertising. Called 1) web design + hosting (think typepad) 2) affiliate marketing fees (think commission junction hooked up to ticketmaster). 3) registration transaction fees (think ticketmaster but with less than assinine fees).