Brian Dear, founder of Eventful, talks to us about how structuring event data is helping people find the events that matter to them and their communities.

What does Eventful do?

Eventful's mission is to help people discover, track, create, and share events. Basically, we want to provide worldwide comprehensive service to help people find events everywhere. We're trying to address a major need that the Internet hasn't met until now, which is basically a search engine dedicated to event discovery.

We're trying to exploit technology to the fullest to help people with one particular niche, albeit a very large niche. On any given day, probably 50 million events go on throughout the world.

What kinds of social benefit organizations have been able to benefit from your work?

The event ecosystem that we've created is so active that it's hard to name specifics, but I know that a lot of schools, libraries and churches are starting to put their events online. Increasingly, we're seeing organizations use a product called Helios Calendar, which is a calendaring plugin for websites. It's interesting to us because its creator has built it with support for the Eventful API.

So now, people only have to click a single checkbox when they configure Helios Calendar to have the program publish all of their events into Eventful. This allows the organization to publish their own events on their website, but they also circulate within the bigger Eventful ecosystem. It's nice because Helios Calendar is used by a lot of non-profit organizations. It's very inexpensive and has become something of a phenomenon. It allows these organizations to retain control of their own website, whether it's a library, church, or charity but it also propagates their information out to Eventful which makes the events discoverable to people who might not already be familiar with the organizer.

We obviously don't direct people to use Helios, but we're more than happy to have developed a technology that developers and non-profits are finding useful.

But really why is that so good? What does the fact that these people's events are coming into Eventful mean? What does that do for them?

Well, we're a tool for what I call the secondary market for any given entity. For example: Meetup—we index all of the events listed on Meetup for the thousands of Meetup groups that organize there, whether they're pet aficionados or political groups or people who want to meet and speak German or French to each other, whatever it might be. We index all of it.

What we've found is that we're significantly increasing the discoverability of these events. For one thing, a lot of people in the world have never heard of Meetup, and often times the Eventful listing for a Meetup event has higher prominence in Google's search results than the original Meetup listing does. So, if people are browsing Eventful or searching Google for a particular event or topic, we can help more people find out about it and deliver a much broader secondary market to Meetup and the group that's organizing the event. In that world, everyone wins.

It's especially great because a lot of Meetup organizations are non-profit or social benefit organizations that provide educational services, or act as support groups for people with diseases or addictions. They provide a key social benefit in their communities, and it's important to give them as much visibility as possible.

What is it about Eventful that makes these events so much more discoverable, other than providing another directory?

Events are inherently structured information. They're very analogous to housing listings. If you're looking to buy or rent a house you want to know how many square feet, and how many bedrooms, and how many bathrooms, and the size of the lot, is there a garage? is it attached? etc. There's a huge list of attributes or data fields that need to be filled in to be useful. Events are the same way. When does it start? When does it end? Address? Price? What kind of event is it? The problem is that events are usually presented on the web as pure text, without any organization.

What we try to do is identify websites that have event listings, extract those listings and try to figure out what parts of the listings correspond to the appropriate data fields. Structuring these data this way increases their searchability by several orders of magnitude. That's the most fundamental thing that we do to make events discoverable.

Tell me about Demand

I first thought of Demand about 10 years ago when I wanted to do a battle of the fans, rather than a battle of the bands. I wanted to have a band's fan base compete city by city to "demand" that their city win a performance by the band. By the time we started Eventful, we realized that we could use this model for just about anything. We've turned it into a tool that anyone can use to create a grassroots campaign to cause an event to happen, whether it's a concert, lecture, film screening, book signing, or anything.

How has Demand been used by people other than entertainers?

The most significant thing has been watching both republican and democratic presidential campaigns use demand pretty heavily throughout their campaigns. Right now, Barack Obama and John McCain are using our services to connect with and rally the people who have demanded them through Eventful. It's been fantastic to see this happen.

Tell me more about how John Edwards used Demand

John Edwards used Demand to run a competition called "Demand and Be Heard" in which he challenged his supporters to tell him which city in the United States he should visit. The city with the largest number of "demanders" would get an opportunity to hear him speak and ask him questions in a live setting.

What was remarkable about it was that a tiny little town in Kentucky won the competition because of the sheer perseverance and drive of one individual who rallied for all the local citizens and surrounding schools and counties demand that Edwards go out there. My favorite takeaway from that experience was a quote from a local man who said that the region hadn't seen so much activity since the Civil War!

It's the most concrete example we have of how Demand has been able to give such a powerful voice to such a small town. It's a real testament to the power that emerges when you connect people.