One more event aggregator

A few days ago I wrote about how you can use event aggregators to support your event monitoring/speaking opps plans. Well, Joshua Lerner, CEO of BusyTonight.com was kind enough to write and give me a heads up about his own service which I had totally missed.

Let’s get BusyTonight
I had focused on Upcoming.org in that previous entry. Upcoming’s schtick is that users manually add the events that show up on the site. BusyTonight, on the other hand, uses the magic of computers and programming. I’ll let Joshua’s note to me speak for itself:

Our approach to event aggregation is unique - we crawl the Web for events on unstructured HTML pages. We identify the relevant features - title, date, description, location, etc. - and make it all available for browsing and search by keyword and category. This results in more events than any other site - we already cover the entire U.S. and are scaling up our Web crawl to include more than 100k sites that contain event listings.

Kudos to BusyTonight for creating something so thorough. Unfortunately, a few problems (from a PR perspective) get in the way of this site being a resource I would highly recommend.

Yes, the site is chock-a-block with with events of all sorts. It’s got festivals, discussion groups, and probably even major conventions. I say probably because it isn’t easy to figure out how to sort using a range of dates. You can…but you have to type this, as an example: 2/16 - 12/30. It’s not clear how you can search beyond the current year — something that becomes critical around the summer when we start planning for activities in the new year.

Also, when you get to the site, it appears as though you’re forced to search by city — you can choose to search all cities only after the fact. The same applies to the categories. And, as with all search engines, some of BusyTonight’s results are bunk. I came across some sort of timeshare thing while doing a search for tennis related events.

Bone throwing
I’ll give them a couple of bones, though. BusyTonight is generous with its RSS feeds — you can create a feed based on any kind of search in order to be alerted to updates relating to it.

BusyTonight also offers something called an EventRoll. Eventrolls are bits of code you embed on your blog or Website that inform visitors about events happening in your city or college. Unfortunately, the execution is poor — from a PR professional’s perspective. You don’t have the option of filtering events by topic and you can’t affect what shows up.

Ultimately it’s clear that BusyTonight is, in its current state, aimed at a more casual audience. It certainly succeeds in that regard, and it does have some limited use for our research…but like I said before, these tools should be a part of your event toolkits, rather than the core of them.