The Events and Venues Database (EVDB) has apparently changed names to Eventful (though the company name appears to remain EVDB). I’m always a proponent of the shorter name, so I can understand the name change, and it may do very well. While “EVDB” may have caught on eventually, it probably wouldn’t have been universal, with some people complaining about the mouthful of the longer version.
In any case, the site looks pretty cool, offering a place to, well, record events. Events can be tagged, so if you find that the local team is playing tonight, but you can’t make it, simply click on the team tag and check out the other times they are playing. Events also support links, so that you can find more information or buy tickets and you can even add comments or send trackbacks. A recent addition allows users to indicate if they are attending the event in question.
Searches can be run on tags, venues, cities, states or zip codes. Each event provides integrated mapping from Google, Mapquest and Yahoo, or you can try the EVMapper mashup to interface with Google Maps.
Individual events, venues, tags or even locations can be tracked via RSS in your favorite feed reader or subscribed to using iCal. You can even download an individual iCal event to import into your own calendar (this works well with Microsoft Outlook). Options are also available to track events by those occuring today, next week and more.
Be careful, though, the iCal download option is available on the full list of events, but when you execute it, you appear to get only a single event, not a whole bunch of them. This makes sense, but it doesn’t seem to make sense why they would have the download on a multi-event listing if it doesn’t work that way.
They even have a blog, which, incidentally, runs on Movable Type. I would guess that the site itself does not, even though it supports comments and trackbacks. Judging by the registration screen, it reminds me of WordPress, but that may just be a similarity and not any actual basis for the site. If you are a developer, they also have an api.
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One response to “Event Tracking with Eventful”
The entire Eventful site is custom-built, and runs on top of the EVDB API. The system was designed such that individual event detail pages functioned like and had attributes consistent with a blog posting — a date/time stamp, an author, a title, the body of the posting itself, tags, trackbacks, links, comments, RSS feeds, and a permalink. So Eventful is actually fairly well-behaved and compatible with the blogosphere. The one thing we don’t do, but could, is ping the usual ping servers when anyone “posts” an event. 🙂
You’re right, the blog is just running on Movable Type and is separate from the site itself.
Just today we launched Eventful Groups, enabling users to join together and collaborate finding and collecting and commenting on events of common interest.