Events

For this year’s Greenbelt a group of us decided it was time to beef up the festival’s ‘social media’ output. With approval from the powers-that-be, the help of some phones from Nokia and the energy that comes from a festival’s buzz, we built up a twitter community, streamed plenty of content live to qik, and enjoyed the fact that the festival’s flickr presence now has a momentum all its own (the official photos had over 100,000 views in the past week and there are over 3600 photos tagged greenbelt2008 as I write this). ...

The MySQL developers seem to be developing a habit of rolling out useful new features in their .1 releases. MySQL 4 was a good release, but it’s the group_concat feature from 4.1 that I miss most often when forced to use a 3.x or 4.0 install. MySQL 5 made some huge leaps forward, but already there’s plenty of talk about the new features coming in 5.1. In particular, I’m looking forward to support for XPath and event scheduling. ...

In between frantic work periods (there’s a chance I’ll launch/complete five sites this week…) I’ve been exploring the new features at upcoming.org. The site’s potential has certainly taken a leap forward with the addition of REST-based webservices, tags, SMS alerts, and private events. It’d be great if as a next step we could see some geolocation data added for the venues listed, making it even easier to integrate with other tools/sites like the ones I was describing previously. In an ideal world, we might even see the site picking up its content from feeds scattered around venue, fan, and other sites, but for now we’re still lacking the standardized vocabularies to smooth that process. In the meantime, it shouldn’t be too hard to write a script that parses local feeds and uses the event.add call to ensure they’re on upcoming… ...