[colug-432] Publicizing technical events (Re: Hadoop interest ?)

[Tom Hanlon]

On Dec 15, 2010, at 3:40 PM, Jeff Frontz wrote:

> I don't know enough about lucene to say for certain, but I think it's effectively just a search engine, right?  Maybe I'm missing something, but I think Google works well enough for me for that.
> 

Your missing something..

Think about the facets of the search you define below and tell me how google gives you that ? 
Not that google does not have that under the hood, the images,blogs,groups,news subsets give you a limited interface. 

You just have little control. 

The information about techie columbus events is available but unorganized, aggregating and indexing and providing an appropriately faceted interface to that info would be somewhat useful in terms of meeting some of your needs below. 

Lucene/Solr give you some of this.. not quite for free but pretty straightforward. 

http://www.lucidimagination.com/Community/Hear-from-the-Experts/Articles/Faceted-Search-Solr



> What I need is something that will actually notify me of events of interest (where I can define interest based on more than just a keyword -- I would like geographic and probably temporal constraints/weighting as well -- e.g., "if the topic of the event is something that I'm vaguely interested in and the event occurs weekdays before 7:00pm and it occurs within the 43201/43210/43212/43202 ZIP codes, please notify me".  Oh, with the previously mentioned "if there is a large enough 'buzz' about an event outside these bounds, tell me about that, too").  I think this "thing" will need to have a critical mass of members who are publicizing things that they see/hear about (as well as things that they're hosting/sponsoring) -- crowdsourcing FTW.
> 
> But, a general "'truly technical events in central Ohio' mailing list" would probably be good enough for the time being.  It would almost certainly need to be moderated and need to initially put synopses of events on other mailing lists (because there will always be folks who "do twitter" but don't "do meetup", etc.), at least until it is a well-defined nexus.  And the moderator(s) will need to be ruthless in tossing away things like "SEO your way to riches", "obtaining stimulus funding to weatherize your marketing cube", "learning about the next noun-turned-verb concept that will compel you to buy my services", and "schmooze away your night with our sales droid" [no offense to the mobile phone].
> 
> 
> Oh, the other place I was thinking about before is http://www.developerfusion.com.  It has a lot of potential, but it really needs more local content to be viable.  And it needs a better (or at least more obvious) way of defining locality.
> 
> Jeff
> 
> 

--
Tom


> 
> On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Tom Hanlon <tom at functionalmedia.com> wrote:
> Enough joking around.. What would perhaps be useful and might be a subset of the functionality that you envision.. would be an aggregator of all the local mail lists, group blogs, individual publications that  are somehow Columbus or Ohio based, and technical and then use lucene or other full text document indexer to deliver a faceted search interface to the sources. 
> 
> 
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Tom Hanlon
tom at functionalmedia.com
Cloudera Certified Hadoop Developer
Certified MySQL DBA