Making the chaff invisible, and getting the wheat ($200 prize too)

again and again the result was "because I had a friend who used to tell me about that kind of thing back then."

Be more social at the things you like and you'll make more friends who will also tell you about that kind of thing. 500 approaches, 100 replies, 20 aquaintances, 5 friends, 1-2 people who will tell you of dozens of that kind of thing. Also, host that kind of thing (after-parties, group rides, theater rental, etc.) with the $200.

Remember you didn't know all the things you like now in the past. This suggests you don't now know things you will like later. So try new things, some of which you will like.

How can you in general have access to the information you want about events, without drowning in an information ocean or getting web addicted.

Timothy Ferris in The 4-Hour Workweek recommends outsourcing parts of your life to digital assistants in third world countries. You could hire one, subscribe his e-mail address to the kinds of lists which inform you about these events, and let him filter out irrelevant entries, all for a very cheap salary. Search that pdf for "assistant" to read the relevant parts. It seems MIRI has also had some positive experiences with virtual assistants, though they use Westerners at a higher hourly wage.

Sign up for Songkick.com and track the artists you named and the SF Bay Area metro area. I work at this company and we exist to solve this problem for live music. We only email you about stuff you have previously told us you are interested in.

There are a bunch of event-recommendation companies trying in this space - one works opposite me. I've seen adverts for yplan, but apparently that's iphone only so I can't say if it's any good. I used to work at last.fm and still use their event recommendations (based on who I listen to), but that only covers music.

Meetup.com is sort of targeted to solve this problem. However it costs money to put events in meetup.com so it doesn't have all events in it.

A failure mode of these types of systems is that the people announcing events apply tags that are as general as possible to appeal to as wide variety of people as possible. So if you say you're interested in, say, Jazz gigs, you might find notifications for things only tangentially related to Jazz. For instance, Blues or even Rock'n'Roll or whatever. Then it's back to the old information overload.

A way to combat this might be to have an inverse rating system. So the more specific people's tags are, and the fewer they are, the higher up they appear in your feed. This would incentivize people coming up with very specific tags that have a very high chance of being related to people's interests.

I don't think there's an easy way to be specifically notified about such a general category of events, except maybe a Facebook account following some very selected sources . For music specifically, though, I can suggest LastFm, which catalogues the music you listen to, and offers a selection of nearby gigs based on your preferences, among other things. It's also quite good for discovering new music that might fit your tastes.

I'd be happy to pay $200,00 to someone who solved this problem somehow.

Decimal point, I presume, not comma.

...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon 1971, pp. 40–41).

Methods for controlling information pollution can be derived from attention economical (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy ) theorems. The key idea is to create property rights on the overload. One example is a cost to send spam. Another the cost to create a meeting in Meetup. The problem is the fair assignment of (initial) property rights.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy#Controlling_information_pollution

Spam filters are fairly accurate, but I don't know much about the false rates of general email (or text in general) classification. Perhaps it's possible to write/train an Ecstatic Dance filter, and turn it loose on the Internet.

I don't have the technical skills to do this, but I would suggest something like this:

1. Find sources where you would find things of interest to you, if they were happening now.
2. Create a tool (or script or something) to scrape their "events" page at regular intervals and then sorts that data, searching for keywords
3. Have it then notify you in some context when something you like is mentioned.

This isn't foolproof (for example, it might say "Band X is the next Beatles!" if you've chosen Beatles ... but then you might find something you like). Pages like meetup, local ticketing outlets, facebook community pages, etc. are a good source. If you google about you might be able to find instructions for doing something like this.

There's also a website called www.ifttt.com which is essentially an "if this, then that" formula for the internet, but it only works for certain websites, and you need an account. It may serve your purposes, though - you could link it to twitter and get emails if given accounts mentioned the word "tour", "concert", "show" or any other relevant word. That's the closest tool that already exists that I can think of.

Google Now has something kind of like this. For android phone/tablet users only right now, so far as I know.