Hooray, ClubWiki is now Open!

Ethan Diamond co-founded Oddpost, the web-based email service universally recognized as the Eighth Greatest Achievement in the History of the Web, rightly beating out eBay, Craigslist and even JenniCam yet inexplicably trailing behind Mosaic and Amazon. Oddpost was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004, and three years later Ethan left to start Bandcamp. Prior to Oddpost, Ethan worked at Adobe, where he met Neal and Joe throwing things off the roof, and then Halfbrain, where he and Shawn pioneered the use of Ajax in the reimplementation of absolutely everything that gramps tells you was already working just fine as a desktop app. Ethan’s interests are HTML and DHTML. He is a graduate.

Before helping to engineer Yahoo! Mail, Oddpost and Halfbrain.com, Shawn Grunberger helped negotiate the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. It was nontrivial.

Joe Holt is a programmer. California-bred, he labored for two decades at Apple and Adobe, but only a fool believes his claims that he co-wrote the very first version of Acrobat, four versions of Illustrator, iMovie and an assortment of unshippable chefs-d’œuvre. In addition to working with Bandcamp, Joe is a professor at Bennington College, Vermont where he creates clones. He didn’t teach Shawn everything he knows. Working with Ethan is a second honeymoon.

Neal Tucker is one of the few people on Earth with the distinction of having been sentenced to 40 hours of community service by his own company’s HR department. After leaving Adobe under murky circumstances, he spent 9 years being “the unix guy” on various teams at Microsoft, which forever brands him “the Windows guy” everywhere else. Much of his career has been spent writing software for embedded devices, so he’s looking forward to stretching his legs on web server code for a while. Neal lives in Seattle, where his hobbies include welding, being comfortable, and trying to convince his wife that it’s normal to wear pajamas until 3pm.

ClubWiki got a nice little write-up over on the The Bay Bridged today. Check it out here. Thanks Emily!

Deep below ClubWiki’s drooling veneer of simplicity lies a site that is, in fact, well…just not that complex. But even a boob has his subtleties, and ClubWiki is no exception. It is in this spirit that I’d like to point out a few of the features that may have escaped your initial gaze:

On each venue’s page, next to the capacity field, there’s a link to venues of similar capacity nearby. We wouldn’t dream of presuming to know your tolerance for $4/gallon gasoline, so a menu lets you decide what constitutes “nearby.” Same goes for the genre field — you can easily say stuff like “show me more ’smooth jazz’ clubs within 150 miles.” We like to imagine that this will assist in tour planning, and ask that you please confirm or deny this fond hope.

On the main ClubWiki page, in addition to being able to search for venues by location and name, you can also search by artist. Contrary to your intuition, we do not mean the artist who painted the venue’s façade, but rather, artists who have played that club. So if you have a similar style and fanbase size to say, The Blüchunks, you can search for them, see all the clubs they’ve played, and plan your tour accordingly.

When you sign up for ClubWiki, you have the option of providing your location. This is not so we can email you a coupon for free Crazy Bread when a new Little Caesars opens down the street. Rather, it’s so we can display local updates on your home page. This allows folks who tend toward the admin side of wiki communities to track what’s happening in their city or cities of choice, and even subscribe via RSS.

Finally, in the course of adding or editing a venue, you may have noticed that we perform some hotshitness on the address field. We’ve always found it annoying when websites ask you to fill in an address, then a city, then a state, then a zip, and all separately. ‘puters is smrt, can’t they figure that other stuff out? Yep. In ClubWiki, you just have to put in the basic address and city name (abbreviated, if you like), and when you pause or tab out of the field, we suggest the full address for you. It is as dope as it sounds.

About six months ago, I was reading a story in the Chronicle about a group of local independent bands who had formed a collective. The basic idea was that members of the collective went to each other’s shows, mentioned one another in interviews, and shared painstakingly-gathered spreadsheets of booking and press contacts. This approach spread out some of the burden that would normally be carried by a label, and reportedly gave the bands a bit more time to focus on their music. It all sounded great, but I remember thinking how goofy it was that they had to create and maintain those spreadsheets in the first place.

I poked around a bit, and found that the existing resources for venue booking information were indeed pretty lame. Offline, you have the Billboard Musician’s Guide to Touring and Promotion, the utility of which is limited by the fact that a) it’s a printed publication, meaning it’s difficult to search, often out of date (it’s published twice a year), and missing the sort of capacity and genre cross-referencing that would be useful to musicians in tour planning, and b) it relies on its editors for completeness. It also costs $16, which most bands would probably rather spend on stuff like strings, food or gas. Online, I found a few different sites offering the info as a subscription service, but they’re expensive (upwards of $100/year), and again, nowhere near complete because they rely on a handful of editors to maintain them (and at a hundred bucks a year, it seems unlikely there’d be enough takers to really motivate those editors).

It was clear by this point why bands would form a collective to share this information, but it was equally clear that that was eminently suboptimal, because the info should be online, free to everybody, and editable by the entire community that uses it. I mentioned the concept to a few of my working musician friends, all of whom were way too busy recording, performing, or not knowing how to program to program it themselves, and they were all over it. Well, around this time my coding friends and I were forming a company to build various web services for musicians, and we realized that wikifying venue information would make a great warm-up project. Sure, it was very unlikely to ever be a business for us, but the data the site would gather would be useful to our real business down the road, and it would give us a chance to get used to working together, test out some of our technology decisions, and coalesce as a team by quickly knocking out a real project. So that’s what we did, and today we cordially implore you to check out ClubWiki. We hope you find it useful. Of course, like any wiki, it’s only as good as the information the community puts into it. So if you’re a musician, we hope you’ll add your favorite clubs, and use it to help book your next show or plan your next tour. And if you’re a club owner, we hope you’ll take the time to add your venue, and subscribe to its entry so you can help keep it accurate. Thanks! We’re looking forward to hearing what you think.