End of an EOR
Winston Salem's first event-bot
An Idea Who's Time Had Come
Until early in 2000 the best way to find out about events was in print--the newspaper or a weekly entertainment publication. Jeff Smith had been changing that with the publication of his email newsletter, Smitty's Notes. But just like the print medium, he had to scour the beat constantly collecting event information. At the same time, a website programmer named Clark Harper had been involved in the Great Decisions series at Wake Forest and was impressed with how Smitty had used the Internet to get event information out. The two met up and came up with a website to collect and disseminate the information and thus was born the Event-O-Rama!
- One stop shopping approach to getting the word out.
- The event database could send a report to Smitty's Notes and feed other websites.
- Completely free and fairly unmoderated.
Passing the Torch
Numerous attempts over the years to try to imitate the 'Rama concept failed because the competitors wanted to use an events portal as just a platform to make money with advertisements. The Arts Council was one of the early adapters and used the 'Rama to run its events calendar. So when they were ready to take over as the central online events source, we let them run with it. Their site is a little stale already, but maybe they are learing the hard lesson that it takes alot of hard dedicated work in the beginning. We'll see.