I'm going... are you?

I remember back when I was a real teacher, I helped organised a concert at the school - by The Electrics in case you are interested. Ticket sales were not going well and I remember being in a bit of a panic that it was going to fall on it face. I had visions of the people in the band out numbering the people in the hall. Part of the probelm (I thought) was that people didn't know who else was going. Crowds attract crowds (I thought). Therefore, I came up with wizard wheeze (I thought). I made up some badges with "I'm going to see The Electrics" on them and gave them away free with the tickets. ...It didn't work and I had loads of tickets and badges left by the night of the concert. Thankfully, it all worked out in the end because the band brought their own fans with them and lots of people turned up on the night and paid at the door.

I was reminded of this event when I discovered the Upcoming website. I think I'm a bit late in discovering this site (I noticed the ubiquitous Mr McIntosh and the inevitable Mr Johnston were already there) but I like the idea. I discovered it thanks to the photo I used in my OLPC - Help wanted! post. In particular it was the small icon of the yellow "u" on a red background in the Additional information section that caught my eye. I'd never consciously noticed it before and I wondered what it was:

The text after it seemed to identify the event where the photo was taken and clicking on the link took me to Upcoming... and a fair bit of time exploring and experimenting followed. :-) The basic idea is that events are created and people can indicate their intention to attend, leave comments about the it, tag it, tell other people about it, and join groups of people interested in the same kind of events. Also, it is integrated with Flickr so that if people tag their photographs with the specially generated tag, the photos will automagically be associated with the event. Brilliant.

It reminded me of LastFM Events which also generates tags so that Flickr photos can be associated with an event (e.g. my photos, along with photos from others who were at a Rush concert) but it deals with more than just music events. It also reminded me of Hitchhikr but with added social networking goodies.

So I created some old events (Upwented?) to try out the Flickr integration (Rush, Dream Theater and Miss The Occupier) and added a real upcoming event - Learning Spaces, Working Places. At the moment, I'm the only person on Upcoming that's going to the Learning Spaces event so if you are going too - why not join, comment and tag?

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Technorati Tags: Upcoming, Hitchhikr, LastFM, Flickr, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog