Sitting on my hotel balcony in LA, looking out at the city and haze I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on in it.

We’re 13 years into mass access of the web but, unless I’m missing something, there’s still no great way to get comprehensive multi-city event information in one place. When I say events I mean a range of events — museums to concerts to street fairs. Its incredible how so often the traditional printed media beats the smattering of upstarts trying to play in this space. There are a few reasons for this:

Metadata is essential
How much are tickets? Where can I buy them? How many nights is this event? Why should I care about this event? Human editors are good at compiling this information search algorithms are not. Services like Eventful suffer because of this.

The web encourages niches
There is no single Source of event trurh online. The nerd leaning use Upcoming. Music fans use Sonic Living. I don’t know who uses Flavorpill. Yelpers use Yelp.

Editorial voices make events interesting
Listings aren’t fun to read on their own. Almost every listings site tries to spice up listings with comment threads but those comments ars usually are along the lines of “can’t wait”. There are far better ways to get visitors to share higher value insights (I have a bunch of ideas here if anyone wants to talk more about this).