Gigism... a vision for the quest

So you go to that show, that gig, you've been waiting for and before the bands go on you bump into friend. They drop the news that your favorite band just rolled through town and you missed it.

Now that sucks! You weren't paying attention; or, perhaps, you forgot to go out to the website for each venue in town (say, there's maybe 7+ active venues in Tucson) and scroll through the upcoming shows. It's a sinking feeling - sure, you'll get over it. But what if the band breaks upon returning home (like Murder City Devils and At The Drive-in did after a tour together). Or the band never makes it back to your hometown. Or the lead singer DO'd and dies. Or one of the guys kills themselves. Or that was the last show before they started writing shitty music. There's a ton of things that can happen to generate intense regret. And ya, regret is bad - but instead becoming better at dealing with regret I'd rather not have to miss said gigs.

The above example is caused more often when you're not looking - something cool happens and you miss it. I've also experienced the Gig-Doppler effect - you see the show coming, but things get business in your life and you hear it after it's already passed you.

This is why I wanted to do 'gigism.' The goal? Create a common, easily consumable master-listing of all shows in town (Tucson). Now, that's casting a large net! So let's narrow it a bit - a master-listing of all shows from touring-bands coming to town.

How do you create such a thing? Well - find some technology that let's you aggregate data efficiently. And, in my case, be able to program.

I got into the idea of aggregating data with feeds (Live Bookmarks, RSS, Atom, whatever you want to call it) after google started their google personalized homepage (which is now going by the lame-name igoogle). I was in San Francisco staying at my friend Stump's and he had a sweet homepage with all this news and information - right there, and automatically updated via ajax.

And you have it - gigism... the motto I picked when pitching the idea to my friends was "no gossip, no photos - just gig info."