Live Matrix, What's When on the Web

It's a tv guide for the Web. Neat. If you want to replace the telly with shows to watch on the web, this is the way to get to know what is running tonight. In their own words:
Live Matrix is the first guide to live and upcoming scheduled events on the Web. We link you to anything that has a start time and can be attended online: audio and video webcasts, live chats, limited-time sales and auctions, conferences, product launches, games and contests, events in virtual worlds, and much more.

Live Matrix was created by Nova Spivack and Sanjay Reddy. I recently met Nova in San Francisco shortly before beta launch and it didn't take long to convince me that LiveMatrix is great. I will watch it tonight.

In a recent newsletter, they shared details how to import data into Live Matrix. There is the old-school web form, CSV uploads, and - alas - a way to specify feed URLs to be crawled by Live Matrix.

Read the LM_Event_Providers_White_Paper.pdf for the XML format specification.

as an old RDF/XML guy, I cannot hesitate to comment on the chosen XML format by livematrix:

<events>
<event>
<link><![CDATA[http://google.com]]></link>
<title><![CDATA[title]]></title>
<start_date>2010-01-01 15:20</start_date>
<!-- Leo misses a    "T"     between date and time. -->
<duration>1:30</duration>
<end_date>2010-01-01 19:30</end_date>
<description><![CDATA[this is the description]]></description>
<time_zone>GMT-9</time_zone>

So they "nearly" reused a standard (ISO dates, RDF, Atom) but like Facebook chose to "simplify" it. Alas, I would say "as long as you give a sample to copy/paste, you can include as many xml:ns declarations as you want in the top" but it seems this view is not shared with everyone.

In the document they say that they also support ATOM and RSS, so I guess if you already have an RDF or other stream with live data on the web, Live Matrix will be happy to include it.