Announcement of partnership between NZLive.com and Eventfinder.co.nz
December 23rd, 2009Today the Ministry for Culture and Heritage made a joint public announcement with Michael Turner, the chief executive of Eventfinder, about a partnership between the Eventfinder and NZLive online events calendars.
This decision has been driven by the necessity for the Ministry to do more with less and to look at different ways we can serve our sector well. We’re excited about the opportunities for the sector that this partnership will create, and feel confident that this will be a cost effective way of publicising more of New Zealand’s rich cultural content to more people.
The merger between NZLive.com and Eventfinder.co.nz will combine their respective 85,000 and 162,000 visitors per month into one ’super site’ under the Eventfinder.co.nz brand. The partnership will also combine the Eventfinder.co.nz and NZLive.com syndication networks, so that you’ll be able to enter your events once on Eventfinder and have them appear in many places online, including The Herald, Stuff.co.nz, Yahoo, AA Travel, Jasons as well as the MetService, Air New Zealand, Tourism New Zealand and many others.
This merger will mean that the NZLive.com website will be closed down in February.
As a contributor to the NZLive.com website all of your events and information about your organisation that appear on the site will be moved to the Eventfinder.co.nz website.
Instead of entering events into NZLive.com you will be able to add them to Eventfinder.co.nz. We’ll be in touch soon with detailed information on how to login and enter your events. The service will continue to be provided free to arts and cultural organisations.
You’ll still be able to access funding information from the Cultural Funding Guide on the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s website: www.mch.govt.nz.
If you are using any RSS feeds from NZLive.com you’ll need to update them to use Eventfinder.co.nz RSS feeds.
You can choose not to have your content moved to Eventfinder.co.nz, but please make sure you let us know by 25 January 2010 if this is the case. Contact us on info@nzlive.com if you don’t want your content to appear on Eventfinder or if you have any questions or feedback.
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These are very sad news.
I don’t think that merging both websites will lead to the creation of one “super-site” with 240.000 visitors.
People attracted to the NZlive website had their reasons why they did not look at eventfinder and they won’t simply move to another format.
Others probably frequented both websites because they were searching for different kind of information, so they are already in the count.
I would be surprised if the number of visitors would significantly rise on eventfinder… let’s say it’ll go up by 20.000 – and then probably go down again a little later to stay roughly on the same level.
What about the other features of NZ? The culture news? Where will they be? What quality will they have?
And will there be no legal issues? I mean, the content was collected in a “non for profit” prospective and now it’ll be published on a commercial website. What about the rights on pictures and so forth?
Even if people don’t mind to have their content published on the other website, they might interfer with rights on pictures (or even on text in some cases), probably even without knowing.
Generally spoken, I am very surprised that the Ministry is giving up its own content network.
Here in Europe, we are struggling to make cultural content accessible for FURTHER use, making it a resource for the creative industry, for innovation.
Many national/regional/local cultural portals were set up in the 90ies and are run by private agencies. In some cases, governments are even paying them to collect information and to run the portals but do not have any access to the collected data – unless they pay, again.
The result is that the content is not accessible because it is seen as a “good”. On top of that, legal issues are related to the fact that terms of use for content differ wether it’s done in a non-profit or commercial approach.
This has either led to monopolies (for example all information on cinema programmes in Germany is basically in the hand of one private company) or to a segmentation of content (and content providers) in a myriad of sectorial or local fragments (the number of local or city agendas is legion!).
In both cases, it is preventing the further innovative use of content by third parties and it is resulting in a considerable delay in the introduction of Web 2.0 services in the cultural field.
NZLive was created with a mandate of serving the community without commercial bias.
Eventfinder is a corporation (50% owned by APN Online Ltd., according to companies.govt.nz), with a mandate of return to shareholders.
Big difference.
More is sometimes less.