Peter Caputa dropped a comment on Jeff Nolan’s post about Zvents. The discussion was about how online event/calendar aggregators did business in a world where everything is rather thinly distributed. Part of the problem is answering how do you get people to contribute content — post their events — to a site that has little traffic, and how do you build traffic without content? The suggestion is that you have editorial staff scouring for content to build the database until reader contributions can catch up, and that’s where Peter comes in, suggesting that content and traffic aren’t where the value and excitement are:
At the end of the day, though, we need to bring the people that plan events together with the people that attend them, so that the planning happens together. Pulling massive amounts of data together and getting eyeballs doesn’t help event planners. What event planners need are tools that help them engage the attendees in the decision making process, promotion process and the documentation process of events. That’s what we aim to do.
We’ve been talking about social calendaring, but Peter’s comments obviously address a much larger concept, one that suggests the web really is turning things upside down. Now we’ve heard it from a dot-commer. We’ve heard it from the Pew Internet Project study on teens. And we’ve heard it from Jenny Levine when she talks about the “4Cs” of “conversation, community, commons, and collaboration.”
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