Here’s a website that somebody should build:

• You register. You enter a bunch of bands that you like.
• The site scrapes the websites of bands looking for what looks like tour dates and builds a calendar of who will be where when.
• When that database indicates that one of your listed bands is coming to your town, it emails you to let you know.

How many times have I gone to a band’s website and found out they were in town 5 weeks ago? I don’t have the energy to search down the website of every band I like in case they’ve posted some tour dates lately.

Or is that all too web 1.0? Maybe people can enter their own recommendations for other websites that do the same thing better, or upload pictures of themselves using the website or something.

Challenge: any such aggregator would have to be able to access and interpret the artsy-horrible flashblobs that pass for websites for so many bands (click on the unlabeled red bird-silhouette in the corner, against the purple background, to see photos! Click on the black circle in the lower left for 20 seconds of abstract animation and the band’s bio!). Perhaps if somebody did start such a service, and more people knew to attend shows for the bands whose websites were standards-compliant text based and hence more easily parsed for tour-date-scraping, then it would encourage bands to build sane websites also operable by mere humans.