I'm still very busy working on FanConcert full time. This week I've been working on the search results, mostly their look and usability.

Short tangent: Wikipedia has been taking a lot of slack (even in the mainstream media) recently about the quality of some of its articles. I agree with some people who have said that the main problem is that the public thinks that Wikipedia is actually a reliable encyclopedia. It's a perception problem and I don't see Wikipedia doing much to educate the public (a predominant disclaimer on every article might help).

With FanConcert I want to improve on the wiki concept of massive online collaboration by controlling user's input into moderated object attributes and tying contributions to users with reputation scores. Submissions will be weighted based on the reputation of the user which will make FanConcert harder to arbitrarily vandalize, unlike Wikipedia. Users could also be given increased weight for specific things if they are experts on the subject (like an artist or venue) or a direct source, like a band member that contributes concert dates for his own band. You can read my blog archives for more of my thoughts.

OK, we're back: The nice thing about having all of FanConcert's object lists as search results is that all of the list code is consolidated and lists can be modified very easily by changing the search parameters, either on the search form on directly in the (relatively human-readable) URL.

Another nice aspect of consolidation is that it's easier to provide lists in different file formats. As a proof of concept I've made initial implementations of concert search results in RSS, Atom and OPML.

partial screenshot of new dropdown

You can "subscribe" to RSS search results with a newsreader, which will check for updates at regular intervals throughout the day for new concerts that match the criteria. Then you don't have to keep checking the website, you just check your newsreader for updates. You could subscribe to an RSS feed that monitors a specific artist or venue for new concerts. This is process is known as syndication.

Syndication is also possible with the Atom syndication format which was recently given RFC number 4287. RSS and Atom do pretty much the same thing but including the extra format is not too hard, so I'm hoping it will make Atom zealots like Tim Bray happy. :) I've been following the Atom/RSS debate a little bit, but as a content provider I'm quite happy to stay neutral and support both formats.

OPML is a format that's been gaining steam lately. Dave Winer contributed to the development of RSS and OPML and is a community leader when it comes to syndication. Incidentally he also had a hand in podcasting, which is getting a lot of buzz lately and has been embraced by Apple and some mainstream radio programs.

OPML could be very useful for storing a list of a user's favourite artists on FanConcert. Users could save their OPML lists as backups and I could allow them to import. OPML could also be used to give lists of RSS feeds (directory in OPML parlance) of upcoming types of events for all of the user's favourite artists.

For example, an artist could have a separate RSS feeds for upcoming concert dates, upcoming album releases and other events. In the future a user could subscribe to all of these feeds en-masse using an OPML list containing all of those RSS feeds. The "directory" grouping of feeds seems to be a very promising feature of OPML but how well will that scale if a user has over 100 favourite artists like I do?

In the future all of FanConcert's search results will probably be available in these formats, as well as other formats that people need. What would be really cool is if I could let people create their own templates so they can make their own outputs from the search results. Then users can support whatever file format they like or use the template support as a custom web service API to FanConcert.

As easy as it is to write templates (views) for Ruby on Rails I can't let users do this because of security concerns (direct use of Ruby eval, apparently). There is at least one tool in development called Liquid that could be exactly what I'm looking for: letting users make custom templates in a secure setting. Sweet.