10/06/2005

Z-riffic Response: Zvents Green Lights Non-commercial Mixmastering

Now this is the dynamic web we've all come to love. Within hours of my posting about the apparent contradictions in Zvents' Terms of Use, one of the Zvents founders drops a comment here that it was an oversight and that it's been fixed already. I love it!

They're only trying to prevent commercial sites from scraping them, which seems eminently fair. Remember the horror era of MSN CitySearch, scraping anything in sight for their 'index', which somehow involved regurgitating whole pages but kept you portal-trapped? Like About.com but more so? Glad I am for a web kinder gentler we have. Though I *still* miss Sidewalks; that was my big lesson in 'archive full pages of anything you like', ya never know when it'll go poof.

Anyway, hats off to Tyler and team for clearing that up! Let le bon temps roulez!

One of the cool potentials I see, possibly already in the works-- Zvents-based Zimbra hotlinks for calendaring. Define a Zvents tag aggregator that autofeeds to your Zimbra, and have it pre-feed events directly onto your calendar as 'tenatives'. Or Zvents hooks into MyTickler, where a feed autogenerates Ticklers. The only thing growing faster than the possibilities is my unfinished projects list. Doh!