ResearchBuzz

I’m sure I’ll find this much more interesting during baseball season. If you’re looking for a place to find event tickets, check out Ticketwood ( http://www.Ticketwood.com ) which first finds events for you and then finds tickets for those events.

Not every last event out there, however. Ticketwood finds tickets for major sports (NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, NASCAR, etc.) Theatre and concert tickets are also covered. You can do a keyword search to find events. I searched for finals and found dozens of results, from tennis to NCAA basketball to, I am not kidding, cricket. (They seem to be listed in order of date, nearest events listed first.) Search listings contain event name, location, and date. The event name looks like a hyperlink but it’s not — click on the View Tix button to get listings of available tickets.

I looked at the Minnesota State High School Class AA Hockey Tournament Quarterfinals. Viewing tickets here found eight tickets available, listed in order of price, with information on the vendors and the location of the seat. (Some of the seat location information is more useful than others.) Vendors available here included StubHub, GreatSeats, and TicketsNow. Again, the vendor looks like it’d be clickable, but it’s not — click on the Visit button to take you to the vendor’s site and actually buy the tickets. A nav on the left will point you to related events, areas, and venues.

It’s a little hard to find but you can browse for events by venue as well as get information on the various ticket brokers on this site. The front page has pointers to cities where you can look for events, but not many are listed. The page for reviewing city-specific events looks like this: http://www.ticketwood.com/cities/New-York-Events.php. If you want to see if your city has listings, substitute your city’s name for New-York. Phoenix, for example, looks like this: http://www.ticketwood.com/cities/Phoenix-Events.php.

Of course this site isn’t going to cover every event in your city, but it’s a great place to get started, especially when you’re looking for sports happenings.

BringFido.com, a directory of pet-friendly hotels and travel destinations, has launched a new events database, available at http://www.bringfido.com/events.htm . This database lists dog-friendly events, either by month or by state.

The front page of the database lists featured events, but not all events — to see those click on the name of the month. Beneath the list of featured events is a US map — click on a state to see all events for the year. (Some states don’t have many events — North Carolina has one, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wyoming don’t have any, etc.) Event listings show event name, date, and location.

Individual event pages (click on the name of the event) provide more information including contact information, cost, and a detailed description of the event. And of course BringFido will also provide a list of dog-friendly hotels in the area of the event.

If you know of a dog-friendly event you’re invited to submit it at http://www.bringfido.com/eventsubmit.htm . While you’re at the site you can also check out a dog-oriented link list and an aggregated list of pet policies for airline travel.

This is a fairly new directory; I don’t even own a dog and I can think of a bunch of events that could be added. Note to self: try to hook these folks up with the Flyball tournaments list…

Crawling the Internet searching for event data? Yoiks. But that’s what BusyTonight is doing, a new search engine for events in the US. (And available at BusyTonight.com .) And though the site submission warned me that the number of listings in the next ten days would increase by two or three times, there’s enough here now to warrant a look.

Search off the front page is for keyword and date. You can also specify a metro area, search across all areas, or get a directory of events broken out by data. (You can see some spider-weirdness when you glance through this directory; while there are events like museum exhibits and sports events, there are also… road closures. Okay, I guess TECHNICALLY that’s an event, but….)

I did a search for jazz in New York with events starting August 15. The search results showed page title, date, and some snippets. The snippets were for the most part not very useful; I had to click on the Details link to really learn about these events. Details did provide for the most part a useful page of information including a map, extensive summary, and date. It’d be nice if there were a quick way for that information to pop up right on the results page.

In addition to searching and browsing by area, you may also browse by category and tags. There aren’t many tags here at the moment, but the category area is extremely well-populated; some of the categories are extremely specific (place names) while other ones are a bit odd (”venue”?)

This is an interesting site. On the one hand, the idea of plowing through unstructured Web pages and pulling out event data is nervy, in a good way. On the other hand, the snippets on the result pages weren’t useful for the most part, I found. How about getting that great Details page more to the front-and-center?