Colin: “Last week, I went to see Sigur Ros with Richard. Like a good Web2.0 denizen, I dutifully marked down that I was attending this event at social calendaring site upcoming.org. I saw that Richard was already there, and was the only other user attending this event. The day of the concert, I thought I would give a quick look to see who else had marked themselves as attending, and was surprised to still see only myself and Richard listed as attending. “Hmmm”, I thought to myself. “Maybe the audience will be composed solely of myself and Richard”. As nice as a private concert would have been, the show was completely sold out, packed with hip youngsters. The lucrative and broad ranging demographic of “Internet Users” was well represented.”
The show was indeed sold out, and there's no doubt in my mind that most of the attendees were younger than my 27 years. I'm pretty confident that the Internet was a pretty major factor in getting people out to the concert, be it LiveJournal (with the amount of posts there, the LiveJournal Vancouver Community puts community sites like, yes, Urban Vancouver to shame) or sites like Pollstar (yet another site at which I shake my fist for not having RSS or iCal feeds!). More likely, though, it was spread through 'old-school' methods, like seeing the concert listed in The Georgia Straight and passing it along via email and phone.
Yahoo!'s purchase of Upcoming.org should give the site a much higher profile than it did up until now, which had most of its flow coming from weblogs like mine (well, and more popular than mine!). I've long tried to integrate Upcoming.org with Just a Gwai Lo, even thinking that including them as fully-qualified posts was a good idea. I've long been a fan of sites that encourage people to leave the house and meet up, and Upcoming.org always felt like it could be successful. Vancouver doesn't seem very receptive to this kind of idea, though, as there are not a lot of events that hipsters tend to frequent (read: concerts) listed there. The site is more of a San Francisco thing, as a screen grab just now makes perfectly clear. That makes a lot of sense: that's where the geeks are concentrated, and geeks tend to spend a lot of time on their computers either thinking about what it must be like to get out of the house or actively planning such a daring move. Yahoo!, which has been buying up a lot of sites with Web 2.0 dust on them, should make Upcoming.org integrate a little more with popular, user-friendly sites like Flickr and the rest of Yahoo!'s web-based services. As long as it mimics close enough what non-geeky people do in real life, this Web 2.0 thing has a chance of taking off. But if only two out of about two thousand young hipsters in a theatre watching a rock concert used it, then it has a long, long way to go.
