CNET had an interesting post a few weeks ago on a service called Live Matrix, which is an attempt to catalog all the live events on the Web. Live Matrix recently left private beta and is available at http://livematrix.com/.

The front page shows you some upcoming events and highlights of the day. You can also search by keyword, or browse by type of events (though the types are pretty skimpy — Shopping, News, Sports, Entertainment, and More.) I did a search for webinar. I got 63 upcoming events (through mid-October.) and 181 recent events. (As a point of comparison, WebinarListings has about two dozen events for Tuesday, September 28th alone.) Each listing has a series of icons that gives essential information about the event, including whether or not it is free, what time it takes place, and some relevant tags. You also have the opportunity to share the event or comment on it (you have to be registered to comment; you can also register through Facebook.) Clicking on the title of the event takes you to a detail page where you can get a more extensive description of the event, get an embeddable widget with details of the event, and go to the event itself (if there is no page yet available, you’ll have the option to set up a reminder for the event.)

I really like the concept of something like this; there are more and more live events online every day, and I’m not aware of a good way to keep up with all of them. But I’d want more functionality. The event types are extremely limited, especially if you’re going to end up cataloging tens of thousands of events. I found the “Shopping” category to be 100% useless to me and I wanted to hide it. The number of events seemed lacking but the site did recently come out of private beta and maybe it just needs a chance to fill out. The site allows you to browse channels — places where there are regular live events — but to me it seemed to make the “one-off” events not associated with channels more difficult to find.

This site is an excellent and moreover necessary idea. If it were mine I’d tweak it some.