Tag: curation

Jazz in Madison, Wisconsin: A case study in curation

~ Jon Udell ~ 1 Comment

The elmcity project’s newest hub is called Madison Jazz. The curator, Bob Kerwin, will be aggregating jazz-related events in Madison, Wisconsin. Bob thought about creating a Where hub, which merges events from Eventful, Upcoming, and Eventbrite with a curated list of iCalendar feeds. That model works well for hyperlocal websites looking to do general event coverage, like the Falls Church Times and Berkeleyside. But Bob didn’t want to cast that kind of wide net. He just wanted to enumerate jazz-related iCalendar feeds.

So he created a What hub — that is, a topical rather than a geographic hub. It has a geographic aspect, of course, because it serves the jazz scene in Madison. But in this case the topical aspect is dominant. So to create the hub, Bob spun up the delicious account MadisonJazz. And in its metadata bookmark he wrote what=JazzInMadisonWI instead of where=Madison,WI.

If you want to try something like this, for any kind of local or regional or global topic, the first thing you’ll probably want to do — as Bob did — is set up your own iCalendar feed where you record events not otherwise published in a machine-readable way. You can use Google Calendar, or Live Calendar, or Outlook, or Apple iCal, or any other application that publishes an iCalendar feed.

If you are very dedicated, you can enter invidual future events on that calendar. But it’s hard, for me anyway, to do that kind of data entry for single events that will just scroll off the event horizon in a few weeks or months. So for my own hub I use this special kind of curatorial calendar mainly for recurring events. As I use it, the effort invested in data entry pays recurring dividends and builds critical mass for the calendar.

Next, you’ll want to look for existing iCalendar feeds to bookmark. Most often, these are served up by Google Calendar. Other sources include Drupal-based websites, and an assortment of other content management systems. Sadly there’s no easy way to search for these. You have to visit websites relevant to the domain you’re curating, look for the event sections on websites, and then look for iCalendar feeds as alternatives to the standard web views. These are few and far between. Teaching event sponsors how and why to produce such feeds is a central goal of the elmcity project.

When a site does offer a Google Calendar feed, it will often be presented as seen here on the Surrounded By Reality blog. The link to its calendar of events points to this Google Calendar. Its URL looks like this:

1. google.com/calendar/embed?src=surroundedbyreality@gmail.com

That’s not the address of the iCalendar feed, though. It is, instead, a variant that looks like this:

2. google.com/calendar/ical/surroundedbyreality@gmail.com/public/basic.ics

To turn URL #1 into URL #2, just transfer the email address into an URL like #2. Alternatively, click the Google icon on the HTML version to add the calendar to the Google Calendar app, then open its settings, right-click the green ICAL button, and capture the URL of the iCalendar feed that way.

Note that even though a What hub will not automatically aggregate events from Eventful or Upcoming, these services can sometimes provide iCalendar feeds that you’ll want to include. For example, Upcoming lists the Cafe Montmartre as a wine bar and jazz cafe. If there were future events listed there, Bob could add the iCalendar feed for that venue to his list of MadisonJazz bookmarks.

Likewise for Eventful. One of the Google Calendars that Bob Kerwin has collected is for Restaurant Magnus. It is also a Eventful venue that provides an iCalendar feed for its upcoming schedule. If Restaurant Magnus weren’t already publishing its own feed, the Eventful feed would be an alternate source Bob could collect.

For curators of musical events, MySpace is another possible source of iCalendar feeds. For example, the band dot to dot management plays all around the midwest, but has a couple of upcoming shows in Madison. I haven’t been able to persuade anybody at MySpace to export iCalendar feeds for the zillions of musical calendars on its site. But although the elmcity service doesn’t want to be in the business of scraping web pages, it does make exceptions to that rule, and MySpace is one of them. So Bob could bookmark that band’s MySpace web page, filter the results to include only shows in Madison, and bookmark the resulting iCalendar feed.

This should all be much more obvious than it is. Anyone publishing event info online should expect that any publishing tool used for the purpose will export an iCalendar feed. Anyone looking for event info should expect to find it in an iCalendar feed. Anyone wishing to curate events should expect to find lots of feeds that can be combined in many ways for many purposes.

Maybe, as more apps and services support OData, and as more people become generally familiar with the idea of publishing, subscribing to, and mashing up feeds of data … maybe then the model I’m promoting here will resonate more widely. A syndicated network of calendar feeds is just a special case of something much more general: a syndicated network of data feeds. That’s a model lots of people need to know and apply.

Curation, meta-curation, and live Net radio

~ Jon Udell ~ 15 Comments

I’ve long been dissatisfied with how we discover and tune into Net radio. This iTunes screenshot illustrates the problem:

Start with a genre, pick a station in that genre, then listen to that station. This just doesn’t work for me. I like to listen to a lot of different things. And I especially value serendipitous recommendations from curators whose knowledge and preferences diverge radically from my own.

Yes there’s Pandora, but what I’ve been wanting all along is a way to enable and then subscribe to curators who guide me to what’s playing now on the live streams coming from radio stations around the world. It’s Wednesday morning, 11AM Eastern Daylight Time, and I know there are all kinds of shows playing right now. But how do I materialize a view for this moment in time — or for tonight at 9PM, or for Sunday morning at 10AM — across that breadth and wealth of live streams?

I started thinking about schedules of radio programs, and about calendars, and about BBC Backstage — because I’ll be interviewing Ian Forrester for an upcoming episode of my podcast — and I landed on this blog post which shows how to form an URL that retrieves upcoming episodes of a BBC show as an iCalendar feed.

Meanwhile, I’ve just created a new mode for the elmcity calendar aggregator. Now instead of creating a geographical hub, which combines events from Eventful and Upcoming and events from a list of iCalendar feeds — all for one location — you can create a topical hub whose events are governed only by time, not by location.

Can these ingredients combine to solve my Net radio problem? Could a curator for an elmcity topical aggregator cherrypick favorite shows from around the Net, and create a calendar that shows me what’s playing right now?

It seems plausible, so I spun up a new topical hub in the elmcity aggregator and started experimenting.

I began with the BBC’s iCalendar feeds. But evidently they don’t include VTIMEZONE components, which means calendar clients (or aggregators) can’t translate UK times to other times.

I ran into a few other issues, which perhaps can be sorted out when I chat with Ian Forrester. But meanwhile, since the universe of Net radio is much vaster than the BBC, and since most of it won’t be accessible in the form of data feeds, I stepped back for a broader view.

Really, anyone can publish an event that gives the time for a live show, plus a link to its player. And when a show happens on a regular recurring schedule, the little bit of effort it takes to publish that event pays recurring dividends.

Consider, for example, Nic Harcourt’s Sounds Eclectic. It’s on at these (Pacific) times: SUN 6:00A-8:00A, SAT 2:00P-4:00P, SAT 10:00P-12:00A. You can plug these into any calendar program as recurring events. And if you publish a feed, it’s not only available to you from any calendar client, it’s also available to any other calendar client — or to any aggregator.

Here’s a calendar with three recurring events for Sounds Eclectic, plus one recurring event for WICN’s Sunday jazz show, plus a single non-recurring event — the BBC’s Folkscene — which will be on the BBC iPlayer on Thursday at 4:05PM my time and 9:05PM UK time. If you load the calendar feed into a client — Outlook, Apple iCal, Google Calendar, Lotus Notes — you’ll see these events translated into your local timezone.

Note that Live Calendar is especially handy for publishing events from many different timezones. That’s because like Outlook, but unlike Google Calendar, it enables you to specify timezones on a per-event basis. So instead of having to enter the Sunday morning recurrence of Sounds Eclectic as 9AM Eastern Daylight, I can enter it as 6AM Pacific Daylight Time. Likewise Folkscene: I can enter 9:05 British Summer Time. Since these are the times that appear on the shows’ websites, it’s natural to use them.

This sort of calendar is great for personal use. But I’m looking for the Webjay of Net radio. And I think maybe elmcity topical hubs can help enable that.

There’s a way of using these topical hubs I hadn’t thought of until Tony Karrer created one. Tony runs TechEmpower, a software, web, and eLearning development firm. He wants to track and publish online eLearning events, so he’s managing them in Google Calendar and syndicating them through an elmcity topical hub to his website.

A topical hub, like a geographic hub, is controlled by a Delicious account whose owner maintains a list of feeds. I’d been thinking of the account owner as the curator, and of the feeds as homogeneous sources of events: school board meetings, soccer games, and so on.

But then Tony partnered with another organization that tracks webinars, invited that group to publish its own feed, added it to the eLearning hub, and wrote a blog post entitled Second Calendar Curator Joins to Help with List of Free Webinars:

The initial list of calendar entries, we added ourselves. But I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just signed up our second calendar curator – Coaching Ourselves. Their events are now appearing in the listings. … It is exactly because we can distribute the load of keeping this list current that makes me think this will work really well in the long run.

This probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. I’d been thinking in terms of curators, feeds, and events. What Tony showed me is that you can also (optionally) think in terms of meta-curators, curators, feeds, and events. In this example, Tony is himself a curator, but he is also a meta-curator — that is, a collector of curators.

I’d love to see this model evolve in the realm of Net radio. If you want to join the experiment, just use any calendar program to keep track of some of your favorite recurring shows. (Again, it’s very helpful to use one that supports per-event timezones.) Then publish the shows as an iCalendar feed, and send me the URL. As the meta-curator of delicious.com/InternetRadio, as well as the curator of jonu.calendar.live.com/calendar/InternetRadio/index.html, I’ll have two options. If I like most or all of the shows you like, I can add your feed to the hub. If I only like some of the shows you like, I can cherrypick them for my feed. Either way, the aggregated results will be available as XML, as JSON, and as an iCalendar feed that can flow into calendar clients or aggregators.

Naturally there can also be other meta-curators. To become one, designate a Delicious account for the purpose, spin up your own topical hub, and tell me about it.

Topical event hubs

~ Jon Udell ~ 6 Comments

The elmcity project began with a focus on aggregating events for communities defined by places: cities, towns. But I realized a while ago that it could also be used to aggregate events for communities defined by topics. So now I’m building out that capability. One early adopter tracks and promotes online events in the e-learning domain. Another tracks and promotes conferences and events related to environmentally-sustainable business practices.

The curation method is very similar to what’s defined in the elmcity project FAQ. To define a topic hub you use a Delicious account, you create a metadata URL as shown in the FAQ, and you use what= instead of where= to define a topic instead of a location. Since there’s no location, there’s no aggregation of Eventful and Upcoming events. The topical hub is driven purely by your registry of iCalendar feeds.

If you (or somebody you know) needs to curate events by topic, and would like try this method, please get in touch. I’d love to have you help me define how this can work, and discover where it can go.