Twenty-five years ago I became frustrated with how difficult it was to find out what was on in Dublin and Ireland, what was happening that I might be interested in attending or knowing more about, so I set up a simple website to keep track of events and essentially create a centralised calendar that I could refer to. I made it a website because I figured if I was irritated by this, other people might be too, and they might also find such a guide useful. And so it was. I constructed it and at first I entered all the information myself, in a format I found accessible. By the end people frequently contacted me to submit their info, I included a form that made that easier, and more and more people were reading the guide. Twenty-five years later and little seems to have improved. I am having the same problem that spurred me to create that website in 2000. I spent hours a week or so ago trying to find out what was on for the October bank holiday weekend, for Halloween and thenabouts. I searched through dozens of websites, tried and failed to access various proprietary media artefacts, and even looked at words and pictures printed on paper. I visited easily 100 different information locations, without much success, each one listing some unique events, some events that overlapped with many other sites, and some events where it was unclear whether they were happening this year, last year or at all. There is information overload but reliable, easily accessible and comprehensive information about what is going on still appears extremely difficult and time-consuming to find. So perhaps I need to (re)create my guide, a quarter century later. More to come.
