Can I get some service(s)?
General question to the folks in and around Houston: what web services are you using? The web has definitely taken a shift towards community based portals over the last few years, and I’ve seen some sites become really popular with other cities, but I have the nagging suspicion that Houston is under-represented. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong sites?
Put to good use:
- flickr
- It looks like there are about 48,000 photos on flickr tagged “Houston”. Not bad at all.
- del.icio.us
- Indeed, tagging seems to work…
- craigslist
- Also highly active: 12,000+ personals; 22,000+ for sale; ~4,000 jobs and ~6,000 services.
Sorely lacking:
- upcoming.org
- Though they haven’t updated much code since Yahoo bought them, and there are still issues to overcome, upcomming.org is a good model of what a community events calendar could be. Sadly, hardly anyone in Houston seems to use it. Only 19 events listed for Houston. Compare to 264 events currently listed for Los Angeles or 369 events for New York, and the 4th largest city in the country is barely a blip on the radar.
- eventful
- Looks a little more promising–more than a thousand local events listed–but the demand queue is pathetically small. (OK, granted, that’s a new feature to the service, but we should get that thing populated and let bands, etc. know that we’d love for them to play here.)
Are there some web services I’ve overlooked? What are you using to track the goings on in the city?
Yep, Eventful has 1064 events listed in Houston at the moment.
As for demands, well, Eventful Demand launched 20 days ago. It’s a grassroots tool — entirely up to fans to start and propagate demands! So, get goin’, start some demands in Houston, and talk about ’em on your blog, and email your friends to join up too, and so on and so on. That’s how the demands are taking off in other cities.
Cheers,
– Brian
Try “This Week in Houston” at http://www.thisweekinhouston.com
No shameless plug intended, but I use a page on my website to track and talk about events I like. But I’ve been meaning to be more active on Upcoming. Craigslist has always treated me pretty good. The houstontx community on LiveJournal is really active and helpful, albeit drama ridden.
For artsy stuff, I like:
http://www.glasstire.com
http://www.onlyinhouston.org/en/calendarevents/monthly.asp
http://www.artshound.com/
Well, this is a shameless plug, but it is applicable to the topic.
I started a site 2 months ago aimed at the Houston photography community, indexing places/locations that are photograph freindly or where people like to go to take photos (not always the same). It’s still in it’s infancy: http://shoothouston.com
Also the blogging community is alive and well in Houston. Bloghouston.net, plubioustx.net, & houston.photobloggers.org are just 3 that I visit daily.
And one of the most popular blogging softwares out there, wordpress, was started by a guy that was living in Houston at the time (he moved to San Fran a year or so ago).