EVDB Followup

A bit of a follow-up to my earlier post on evdb: there's a bit of a conversation in the comments, with notes from both an evdb person and the developer of upcoming, which recently got a nice upgrade. Jon Udell has a good post with lots of linkage to reports of an evdb demo, and discusses the importance of services not locking-in your data.

I'd like to discuss something else, though, which is that neither are answering my complaint, which is lack of data. Both services rely on user-provided data, which is fine but is prone to error and incompleteness. What would be nice is if the big holders of that data (ticketmaster, pollstar, etc.) realized the benefit of opening up to services like evdb and upcoming.org (or, more likely, they come to a license agreement to use their data). Until this happens, I'm unlikely to be too jazzed about a service, no matter how open and cool it is, because if I can't trust that it's going to inform me of an event I'm interested in (and in a timely manner, i.e., before tickets go on sale), I'm not going to put my trust in it. Yes, it's great that I can let people know that I'm going to be at an event and all that nice social-network whatnot, but that isn't the main reason someone (well, someone like me anyway) would use an event site: I use it so I know what events are coming up. That, to me, should be the bare minimum for an events site: good events data. Without it, no amount of cool data slicing/splicing/sharing is going to be of use to me. With it, I'll put up with a lack of other features (which is why I still use pollstar.com, even though it sucks in every other way).