Buzzd is a mobile social network that caters to the latest events going on in your town. Want to know where your friends are right now? How about finding out how many people in your network are at an event you've been debating on attending? Buzzd could be just what you were looking for. The award winning service has the scoop on all the hottest bars, clubs, and social scenes in your town. All of which is conveniently available from your mobile phone browser or via a text message.

Features

With multiple partnerships with Flavorpill, TimeOut, and Zagat, Buzzd provides its user base with over 1.2 million venue listings. With each venue listing users can grab maps, directions, and live reviews before heading out the door. All of this is readily available from the Buzzd WAP site, meaning no download required. Users can also add their favorite venues to their Buzzd profile to receive notifications of upcoming events. If you're a promoter, stay tuned for more news on a future release for Buzzd PRO. This service will allow promoters and artists to gain mass exposure on the Buzzd network with their own custom profiles and more.

Partying With Buzzd, but Only in Metropolitan Areas

The service is available across a plethora of handsets. It also works with just about every American mobile carrier. We recommend checking out the service if you're in a major metropolitan area such as New York, San Francisco, L.A., or Miami. However, like every other mobile social network, Buzzd is only valuable in the big city. We tested the service in Atlanta and Miami and found plenty of places to go and venue reviews to help us decide what was worth our time and money. Once we traveled to less tech oriented lands, it was clear that we'd have to resort to more arcane methods of finding what's buzzing. Don't get us wrong, we think Buzzd is one of the best mobile networks for finding events, but only if you're in a major city. Sorry suburbia.

Virgin Mobile Branded

On the other hand, Virgin Mobile subscribers are in for a real treat. Today, Buzzd announced its latest partnership with mobile carrier. Virgin Mobile will be the first carrier to formally offer Buzzd to its subscribers. Virgin Mobile subscribers can look forward to a ton of exclusives and can access a Virgin Mobile branded version of Buzzd from the Virgin Mobile WAP homepage. This partnership will allow subscribers of the Virgin Mobile network to share their latest happenings with others on the same network via Buzzd. Hopefully by partnering with Virgin Mobile, Buzzd will be able to expand its networks offerings not only to smaller carriers, but smaller cities.

Buzzd is one of an emerging breed of mobile apps, that basically enables real-time social networking using phones. Apart from powering Bonnaroo Mobile, Buzzd allows people to use their mobile phones to find an event near where they are, then buzz their friends to meet them there. It operates under the catchphrase: "Your city, in real time".

80,000 people are expected at Bonnaroo, and the festival features some awesome music artists - such as The Raconteurs, Kanye West, Pearl Jam, Jack Johnson and many more. According to Buzzd CEO Nihal Mehta, Buzzd at Bonnaroo will bring "user-generated real-time updates" to music festivals for the first time. Bonnaroo Mobile will be accessible through the Mobile Web browser of consumers' handsets, as well as SMS. It is a free service at Bonnaroo and the company says it will work "across all cellular carriers".

The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival is described on its website as "a four-day, multi-stage camping festival", being held on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, on 12-15 June.

Other than Buzzd, there are a number of interesting Web-media things happening at Bonnaroo. Some examples: Bonnaroo Radio channel is a radio station for the festival, powered by Microsoft's Flash-like technology Silverlight; Nokia and film-maker Spike Lee are creating a "massively collaborative film", which will have a presence at Bonnaroo; FM Publishing (which provides adverts for ReadWriteWeb and other blogs), has created a "collective, crowdsourced media campfire of sorts" called CrowdFire.

Update: Social Media platform KickApps sent us a note to say that they are powering the online community and media management system for Bonnaroo.com.

Are any RWW readers going to Bonnaroo? If so please leave a comment telling us what you're looking forward to experiencing - especially if it's Web-based!

See also: The Future of Mobile Social Networks: 4 Promising Services

Here's how it will work: Dapper lets users identify and tag particular fields on any page. It then extracts the value in that field and makes it available in XML. As a result of this advertising activity, Dapper believes a substantial quantity of pages around the web could have fields of interest delineated and tagged with relevant terms. Relationships between pages and fields and terms and tags can all be extracted and analyzed from this aggregated activity.

Dapper currently has 35,000 extraction functions (Dapps) created, but they are betting that a clear profit motive will incentivize advertisers to create many, many more. Advertisers will pay to have web content delineated by field and categorized.

The company argues that advertisers see substantially increased relevance and click-through if ads can be served based on very specific fields of content on a page. Early prototypes run on top music site Pitchfork and book summary site Shvoong saw 100 to 500% increases in CTR.

While Dapper's approach would likely leave the vast majority of fields on a page unindexed, it could also rack up a whole lot of semantic knowledge by riding the profit motive to discover the semantic meaning of the most monetizable fields on a far greater number of pages than would likely be analyzed otherwise. What better way to analyze the web than to ride along with ad networks? I can't think of any better way.

I think Dapper has a shot at helping fund the semantic analysis of much of the web. What will they do with the data other than use it to contextualize ads? That's another question, but an interesting one to consider.

Dappercamp was a great event this week and the tool itself is one I highly recommend. It's in startup mode and I'll be frank - many of the output formats simply don't work and there are a number of errors throughout the site. None the less, I derive significant value for my work every time I engage with it. Here's a screencast tutorial I recorded on the service. Several Dapps, Dapper-created data extractions, have become daily go-to sources of information for me - but I also recognize that only so many people are going to be as excited about this technology for research purposes. For the rest of the world, for the viability of the company, and for the potentially gigantic secondary benefit of widespread semantic indexing - I think putting Dapper in service of ad networks is a plan of simple brilliance.