Building the J-Future

There are people on the other side of your screen and they want to network, teach and just plain party. Here’s a few tools to help you join in on the fun.

Monitoring for events and activities can also provide reporters with opportunities to write articles about what is going on around town.

Event Search

If you’ve reserved a ticket for an event through the internet, there is a pretty good chance you’ve used Eventbrite. The service allows easy event creation and billing that has been irresistible to pretty much anyone.

What you may not realize is that Eventbrite has a very easy to use search feature that allows you to view all the events in your location. From the Eventbrite main page you can type in a location and watch as all the events pop up on your screen. Take the opportunity to check regularly and you’ll often find fun things to do.

Plancast is a relatively new service, so it may not have caught on in your area, but if it has it can be an immensely useful tool for finding out what’s going on.

Once you sign up for a Plancast account (I highly recommend Facebook Connect, as it syncs in your Facebook events) you can find your social media friends through both Facebook and Twitter.

You can also do a search at the top of the site with your location. This allows you to see all the events occurring in your area, but it also allows you to view users who list your location as their home base. Subscribe to them through Plancast and you’ll see whenever a fellow local intends to go to an event.

Do a search for your location on Facebook and click the Events tab on the left. What pops up is a list of all the events visible to you, sorted by date, that list the search terms as their location, or as part of their name.

Another great list, many Facebook events are created or attended by students and provide opportunities for coverage on a college campus.

Meetup is a community of communities online. The site is based around local groups that throw local events and the best ways to plan and publicize them.

You can search by the name of your location or your zip code and find all the groups in your area that use Meetup.com as a base of operations. Another click on the upper toolbar allows you to view a list of events, sorted by distance from you and date occurring, an incredibly easy way to hunt down opportunities to network and have fun.

Once you start signing up for events and have a Meetup account of your very own, make sure you put your location into the info. You can then sign up for e-mail alerts when someone starts up a group near you.

After you’ve joined a few groups, you’ll want to subscribe via RSS to your home feed, allowing you to see event updates for your RSS reader.

It’s not immediately obvious when you first log in to Google Calendars, but you do have the option to search all the public calendars on the system.

Once you’ve logged in with your Google account, click the “Show search options.” Type your location into the third “Where” option and make sure you’ve selected “All Calendars” from the “Search” option on the bottom. Hit the Search button and see hundreds of events line up for your viewing.

Join Lists

It can sometimes feel that mailing lists are a thing of the past, unused on today’s internet. However, that cannot be farther from the truth. Mailing lists are going strong and are often used by local groups to keep in touch. Joining one could be your way in to fun events in your town or city.

L-Soft is the company that created the software many ListServs use. They also provide a page to search all listservs that are visible through their software. Type in a few variants on your location and you’ll see a few local listserv groups pop up.

The other major e-mail group service is Google Groups. Go down to the second search field on the main page and type your location into the “Search for a group” field. The results should be a number of local groups.

Monitor the stream

The real time stream can provide a useful glimpse into what people are doing, but it can be difficult to isolate your view to just one physical area, in order to find relevant events.

TwitterLocal is an Adobe AIR app that allows you to watch all of Twitter for posts geo-tagged with a certain location. The application is very useful for seeing what is going on in your area. Keep an eye out for events here.

Location-based services have become the next big thing in social media circles. Don’t underestimate their usefulness for showing what areas get the most activity, when people are gathering, or what locations have become hotspots. Keep an eye on your local check-ins, use the services yourself, and just generally monitor the streams for useful information.

In Gowalla you can search the Spots tab for places near you. Foursquare’s search localizes based on your specified or IP location. Brightkite allows you to search for specific places.

All these services are just the start for seeking out events and off-screen opportunities. Don’t forget to keep in touch with the people you meet. Never undervalue a good Twitter or Google search either. Most of all, don’t forget to have fun!