WoW: Google meets iCal meets RSS meets the BBC

A while ago I had a GREAT idea, a truly WONDERFUL idea. This idea could change the world, make someone a lot of money (maybe) AND was both simple and feasible. The only downside to this idea was that it wasn’t hugely original.

I talked to a few friends “in the know” about this idea and they pointed me at some sites and initiatives that seem to almost implement this great idea.. almost.

This is the problem

Ever tried finding What’s On in a particular place? If you are lucky you might find a few sites that have listings of What’s On at the cinema or theatre or whatever. You have probably struggled with this yourself, I know I have and unless you find a great site with heaps of listings of everything from small get togethers in a pub to huge media advertised events you have to hop from site to site taking notes. It really doesn’t work.

This is the idea

RSS newsfeeds are everywhere. They work. Podcasting is cool and is essentially only adding audio file attachments to RSS feeds. It works.

Why not add a calendar file (say an iCal calendar file) and some geographic coordinates to a RSS feed. You would then be able to find any events in or near a particular place, not only that, you could subscribe to “What’s Happening in York” with your regular RSS reader or web site.

It’s Google Maps meets NetNewsWire meeting iCal meets the BBC.

Here’s What The Idea Needs To Pickup Momentum

Nothing. Well, almost nothing. All this idea needs is a format. It almost doesn’t matter what that format is, although it needs to be as easy as RSS. In order this idea happens, it just needs people to agree it a good idea and do it. That simple…
1. Everyone to start adding certain tags to their RSS feeds. Once enough people do that, the people who write Bloglines or NetNewsWire won’t be able to resist adding features that support showing you feeds from your home town or where you plan to go on holiday next?
2. It has to be both centralized AND distributed. It needs to distributed (not owned and free) so that anyone who chooses to use it can do so without “permission” from anyone. It needs to be centralized, so that somewhere there is a “What’s On Where” web site where someone without any XML knowledge can create their events easily and that can be used by someone to locate the events easily, like Google for events.
3. A cool name. Podcasting is cooler than RSS audio enclosures. If this idea had a cool name like WoW files (What’s On Where), people might talk about it.
4. Simple examples for developers to copy. Most developers haven’t got a lot of spare time, if they can implement this in under an hour, you don’t have to have a gazillion great proof of concept web sites to persuade developers into buying into the whole ideas.

What Comes Next?

It’s easy to see what happens once everyone starts using WoW files. Google overlays events on a map of your home town. Porn companies try to spam Wow files to make sure that XXX events are happening in every location in the world, but nobody subscribes… cool… The BBC hack the WoW tags into their local information pages… Site’s like Meetup.com disappear because Lord of the Rings fans can simply add their monthly pub meet up in the main Wow site and attract people who didn’t know otherwise that the event was on.

Who Makes Money?

There could be some way of making money. The central WoW site could make a lot from advertising, or it could sell data to mobile phone companies. Imagine what location + time aware texts could do on your mobile… I’d pay to access the data if it was good quality (but then it wouldn’t be good quality unless I can access and create it for free). So, probably nobody will make money, thank god. Well, nobody will make money by being a gate-keeper because the presence of a gate-keeper makes people walk around and look for the hole in the hedge.

What’s The Problem?

This is one of those problems that keep coming around that kind of goes…

If everyone would do this, then everyone would benefit, but it’s only when everyone does it, that everyone does.

… chicken and egg.

What Shall I do?

Like the chicken and egg problem, it’s really very simple. There are people doing really interesting work in this area.

1. If you are someone who publishes an RSS feed that has either location-based or events-oriented information. Then take a look at the hCalendar format and try adding some tags to your feed. It’ll only take half an hour, you’ll be glad you did. I invoke the PledgeBank to make the web useful
2. If you have the skills, time and opportunity. I invoke the power of the Lazy Web to make a site that lets people enter events, with locations into a central site. (I couldn’t get trackback to stick.. can I invoke the meta-lazyweb to put this idea on LazyWeb for me please?)
3. If you are an Ajax hacker, go to the central events site and make a Google Map interface for it.
4. You you are PHP icalendar type hacker, make a calendar interface for it too.
5. If you are none of the above, simply tell someone about the idea.

Why didn’t you tell us about this idea sooner?

Well, you know how it is. I’ve had this pet idea for so long I thought that if no one else had thought of it by now then maybe it was just me that had had it.

And anyway, it’s not really my idea anyway… when I’ve chatted to people about it, they’ve come back with similar ideas themselves.

And one day, the idea was, that when I had a spare week or so that I could sit down, create the central registration equipped events site, an xml format for WoW files, a validator, tools to turn UK postcodes into latitude/longtude coordinates, a hack for google maps, a web crawler to find and “propose” any web page to a submission procedure that gathered any web page that either had a post code or a date in it for inclusion in the events database and a AppleScript to get data from an RSS feed and show it in iCal. All of which I’ve either half done or are capable of or could learn how to do in a day or so. It’s not a lot of work really… actually now that I’ve written it down… blimey.. it’s a lot of interdependant little bits of work isn’t it?

I’ve just watched this video demo, found via kevin and sam. And it does scare me a bit. MicroSoft have had the same/similar idea which always makes me feel uncomfortable, firstly because I know they’ll arse it up somehow and secondly because it means that I must be thinking like microsoft. But go watch the video anyway, they have done some interesting work and are getting all excited about RSS for the same reason I did… because it’s simple and it’s everywhere.

Let’s Do It

So, I want this idea to happen. It seems to me to be a good idea and a “good thing”. It could be free, useful, empowering information. And it could mean both you and I could find something interesting to do without having to spend days and days trawling through Google results.

So.. lets all find the people already doing the good stuff like hCalendar, lets add the tags to our feeds, then pester the people who make bloglines and NetNewsWire and see what happens.

This is the next killer app and it’s just waiting for everyone to build it, contribute to it and then use it. Trust me, this time next year you’ll be wondering how you survived without it.