Wazzup Local Frequently Asked Questions
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  1. What is Wazzup Local?
  2. I want the detailed description please
  3. How does Wazzup Local work?
  4. Please elaborate.
  5. Who should post on Wazzup Local?
  6. What about out-of-town acts?
  7. What about private events?
  8. Can I have a login?
  9. Can I sign up for a login automatically online?
  10. How do I prove that I deserve a login?
  11. It sounds good but how much does it cost?
  12. Why a login? Why can't anyone just enter data and Wazzup Local approve it (or not?)
  13. Why should I list my events in Wazzup Local? I already put them in the newspaper.
  14. My events already seem to be on the calendar. Why should I bother to enter them myself?
  15. Why does Wazzup Local use the secure protocol? You're not doing money!
  16. Why does Wazzup Local make all those complaints about the SSL certificate when I log in? Does this mean the Wazzup Local site is not secure?
  17. How much work is it to enter event?
  18. I have an event that recurs weekly. Do I have to enter it each week?
  19. My event recurs weekly except the first Friday. Can you handle that?
  20. Can I login and enter my friends' gigs?
  21. Our website doesn't have a calendar. Is there some way to filter out just our events and have a private calendar on Wazzup Local?
  22. Our website already has a calendar.
  23. What is my profile and why should I edit it?
  24. What do you do with our contact information?
  25. What is this default genre and limit venues stuff?
  26. What if I want to put on an event at a venue that you don't have?
  27. Does it cost anything to create a new venue?
  28. What if I have to cancel my event?
  29. What if I want to sell tickets to my event?
  30. How can I help Wazzup Local gain more traction?
  31. How can I put a link to wazzuplocal on my website?
  32. How can I advertise on wazzuplocal?
  1. What is Wazzup Local?The quick answer: Wazzup Local is a distributed control community calendar.
  2. I want the detailed description please. Wazzup Local is a searchable, filterable community-driven calendar with many useful features. Take the time to learn about it. Unlike most free web gimmicks, Wazzup Local can actually help you, but like any business tool, you need to know what it can do and how to use it.
  3. How does Wazzup Local work? It works on the principle that many hands make short work
  4. Please elaborate. Although posting an event is quite easy, it would be extremely burdensome for one person to enter them all. People have tried to start a thing like this before, but if centralized site management has to verify all the data and enter it, burnout and failure is guaranteed. We are much too lazy to do that, and we have a better idea: decentralized control
  5. Who should post events on Wazzup Local?We bet that there is at least one person who cares about publicizing each event. Our idea is to find those people who care and let them be responsible for posting the events they care about. For example who cares most about publicizing Joe Local-singer-songwriter who has a tips-only gig at XYZ coffeehouse this Tuesday night? Well, we're betting that would be Joe himself. So once we are convinced that Joe is bona fide and gigs regularly in the local area, and not some juvenile cramming the calendar with many copies of many bad words, we give Joe a login and a password and he can enter all his gigs forever and ever AMEN.
  6. What about out-of-town acts that come through town? We would expect that the venue or the organization that booked both them and the venue might wish to publicize the event. Let's face it, that type of act is all about making money. Venues and promoting organizations can have a login and password as well. That way they can publicize non-local acts that will just be here for one engagement and would not have their own log in.
  7. What about private events? In Q3 2007 we will have a private option for events. These events will not appear ever on wazzuplocal public calendar. They will appear on YOUR filtered calendar only if you link it on your own website.
  8. Can I have a login?Certainly, if you are a bona fide local venue, an organization, promoter, or a regular gigger in the area covered by this web.
  9. Can I sign up for a login automatically online?Yes, you may sign up online, but you must be approved by a human before your login will work.
  10. How do I prove that I deserve a login? It's not too difficult. If you manage a venue, you provide a physical address that we can google map and check to see if it's real. (There are a few special exceptions to this.) For an organization, it helps if we've heard of you. A website helps. Sending us complimentary tickets to a really kick-ass event is always good. For a gigger, if he/she/they has/have a website with a calendar, that's a start. Offering a CD for sale is good too. Sending us a promo CD just like you would to a radio station pretty much guarantees we'll believe you. Knowing or knowing some one who knows the owners of the site is always helpful. Inviting us to a gig as guests of the band and buying us a beer works.
  11. It sounds good but how much does it cost?You're gonna like this answer. Ready? ZERO. Nada. Zilch. Goose Eggs. Basic listings are free for all. Link to your website is free for all (unlike some publicity and listing sites.) If you'd like bold or larger type you can pay for that, though. Eventually we'll be selling our ad space. And of course we won't stop you from making a donation if you like the calendar and want to support it until it becomes self supporting.
  12. Why a login? Why can't anyone just enter data and Wazzup Local approve it (or not?) This goes back to the fact (a) that we're lazy, and (b) we like to empower people to be responsible for their own data. Back to (a): We don't want to vet events over and over. We'd rather vet people, once. Once you have a login, that certifies that we believe you will enter valid events. So we don't have to vet every single event that gets entered. Your events start showing on the calendar instantly. Events that you enter are tagged with your login, so if someone enters junk, we know who did it and we cancel their login. No reinstatements, no second chances. Also, we let you clone your recurring events. And if you make a mistake, like get the wrong day, you can edit your event. You not us. So if it's wrong, it's not our fault.
  13. Why should I list my events in Wazzup Local? I already put them in the newspaper. Let us ask you a question. Why would anyone turn down free publicity? Please see the next question!!
  14. My events already seem to be on the calendar. Why should I bother to enter them myself? We have a number of sources which we automatically feed to our calendar. They give us only the most rudimentary data about the event, and we have no way to verify them. Here is a list of reasons why you should get a login and enter your events yourself:
    1. LONGER EXPOSURE: The newspaper only lists events in the immediate future. Wazzup Local lets you list them as far ahead of time as you know about them. And after they're over they STAY forever so you can refer to them for arhival purposes.
    2. WORLDWIDE EXPOSURE: We are local; the web is worldwide. Google likes us. Your event will be findable on Google in 24 hours. So picture Gerry and Wendy from Illinois planning their Oregon vacation for two months down the pike. They like interesting local color, like most visitors to our area. So they google. They are googling for things to do in the Willamette valley and they find our calendar. And Wendy might say to Gerry, "Oh look, Gerry, Cow Plop Bingo in Alsea on the 27th! We can go to that on our way to the winery." They won't read about your Cow Plop Bingo in the fancy brochures. The web is worldwide, and will extend your exposure to people who you can't reach through any other means.
    3. CONTROL: Just like the newspaper after you've submitted it, you have no control of the listing you don't enter. When you enter it yourself, if you need to make a correction (and you know you will!), you can do so any time before the event happens.
    4. CUSTOMIZATION: You can turn Wazzup Local into a marketing tool for yourself by jazzing up your event listings with website links, special notes, and a picture. If your event comes in off the feed, it just gets the generic treatment.
    5. SEARCHABILITY: Visitors can filter the calendar to just see events that are listed by a specific organization. This only works if the listings were entered by that organization, otherwise it's just generic.
    6. PROMO:You can link to the filtered calendar of just your events from your own website. Posting events to our calendar gives you the best of both worlds: it can act as your own private calendar and it's way faster to update than updating and uploading html page, yet the events will also be searchable by anyone who visits Wazzup Local. Wazzup Local gives you an automatic link on Google and helps increase your page ranking.
    7. COMMUNITY:You know what they say: Network network network! Being a member of Wazzup Local automatically puts you on our mailing list. We occasionally inform our members of community happenings and site announcements. There is NEVER a third party commercial message and we only email about once a month.
    8. MULTI-GENRE:. Most of our feeds don't indicate genre, or don't do it well or consistently. Our system employs heuristics to try to guess a genre for each feed event. It only enters one genre per event, and it may be wrong. When you enter the event you can indicate all the genres which it fits under and it will be searchable under all of them.
    9. NO GUARANTEE: Just because your event got fed in automatically this week does not guarantee that your next one will. Feeds are inconsistent and unreliable. We don't control them. Do it yourself and be sure you're always there way ahead of time, and that your data is controlled by you.

  15. Why does Wazzup Local use the secure protocol? You're not doing money!Logging into Wazzup Local gives you a lot of power. We don't want our logins to be sniffed. And we actually do take money to offer you additional value, but we don't wish to dwell on it.
  16. Why does Wazzup Local make all those complaints about the SSL certificate when I log in? Does this mean the Wazzup Local site is not secure?The site is secure. Web browsers have a hard time with us using the Tix•R•Us certificate for Wazzup Local. Theoretically one could steal someone's certificate and keys and use them to encrypt some other site's transmission. In our case we're stealing it from ourselves because we own both domains, and it works because they both live in the same place. If we could buy Wazzup Local its own certificate we would, but we can't do it affordably with the current configuration.
  17. How much work is it to enter event? There are four required datapoints to create an event: genre, event name, venue, and start time. With appropriate genre and venue default settings, you can cut this down to just name and time.
  18. I have an event that recurs weekly. Do I have to enter it each week? No, you can make up to 20 clones of any event. If you select our recur weekly option, the dates will be already set up for you.
  19. My event recurs weekly except the first Friday. Can you handle that? Well of course you could always enter the dates manually, but it's easier to use the weekly recur clone option and select the "SKIP" checkbox beside any date that you wish excluded.
  20. Can I login and enter my friends' gigs? Sure, as long as they're real gigs and your friends don't mind. But maybe they would like to have their own login so they can fix it if their name gets mispelled or the time changes and you're out touring in Western Montana.
  21. Our website doesn't have a calendar. It would sure be nice to have our calendar on our website. You can! In your profile there is a custom link that filters everything except your events. Put this link on your website and voila! instant calendar! Entering 2 datapoints on wazzuplocal takes seconds.
  22. Our website already has a calendar.We'd wager it is a pain. If you like pain, who are we to judge, but we bet there's other things most folks would rather be doing than updating their calendar.
  23. What is my profile and why should I edit it?Your profile contains basic contact information about you and your organization, plus some preferences which can make it much faster for you to enter events.
  24. What do you do with our contact information? We treat your information with the utmost of care. It is our bread and butter, and the last thing we are going to do is abuse it. Obviously we use it if we need to contact you. Under some circumstances we allow visitors to your pages to contact you via email through a form. This form guarantees that your email address will never be exposed directly on the web: visitors will only get your email address if you respond to their inquiries. And we've got a captcha to prevent robots from spamming the contact form.
  25. What is this default genre and limit venues stuff?We have a potentially unbounded sized list of venues and a substantial number of genres. Scrolling through all of them to find the one or ones you want is tedious. So you can select your favorite genre and venue to be your defaults -- preselected whenever you create an event. Most people have one or just a few genres and venues that they use regularly. You can choose the subset of venues and genres that apply to you. Your choices will be limited to just these, making it much faster for you to enter events. If you ever need to go outside your comfort zone you can edit your profile and add another genre or strange venue to it.
  26. What if I want to put on an event at a venue that you don't have? A logged-in member can add a venue by providing the name, address or location and county. It doesn't even have to be in our area. So if your band is having a tour you can have your complete calendar.
  27. Does it cost anything to create a new venue?Nope! We like getting new venues. All we ask is that you be careful and accurate with the data. We don't like incorrect data.
  28. What if I have to cancel my event? You're not obliged to do anything, but you will make YOUR public happy if you keep them informed. You can either delete the event from the calendar (providing you entered it and the date has not passed yet) or you can enter a note about the cancellation or any rain check plans.
  29. What if I want to sell tickets to my event? We like this question a lot! You are already halfway there. We offer ticketing service with the most reasonable charges you can find. (Please let us know of anybody who can beat our pricing!) Ask us to enable you for ticketing, then use your login to create your event on Tix•R•Us. There are ticketing options over on that side. Please read our ticketed event producer FAQ for further information.
  30. This is really awesome. How can I help Wazzup Local gain traction? Great question! More traction for Wazzup Local means more leverage for your events. Use our tell-a-friend forms to invite people you know to visit. Don't wait for some one else to talk it up. It's easy. We have a premade message for end users and for event promoters. Post your events regularly, link to us, put your calendar on your website, and use it to find things to do. The calendar will naturally skew to favor the people who use it most.
  31. How can I put a link to wazzuplocal on my website? We love that question! We have a selection of attractive very small badges you can put on your website. Having our button sends an unspoken message that you are linked in with the local community. Local connection is a very powerful positive warm fuzzy for many potential attendees to your event. Click here to get the badges.
  32. How can I advertise on wazzuplocal? We love this question too. There are two ways to advertise. The quick and easy way is to buy our google ads on your own pages. You can do this if you have a google adsense account. We simply replace our adsense id with yours for the month on "your" pages. For advertising replacement purposes "your pages" are calendar pages either filtered by your id or referred by your web or both. The price each month is based on the historical performance of your pages, and starts at a minimum of $5 per month. The other way to advertise is to buy traditional targetted banner ads and is expected to roll out Q4 2007.