OK, two points there.
1. Mapping.
It's nice to see the internet being used to view information in new ways. Whether it works or not... hey. Depending on your mindset, even failures are excellent chances to learn and refine what you do. So I applaud the effort gone to here to try and make life interesting / better for people interested in dance.
2. Details vs. just linking to the various sites.
Data deduplication (i.e. only having one copy of the information) is all well and good in an ideal world.
Agreed that details on the summary site which are drifting out of sync can be a problem.
Also agreed that sometimes the information shown on each organizer's site may be inconsistently displayed, hard to find, out of date (as well). (Not every dance organiser is a web designer).
My approach on this is to provide the info in an easy consistent format, and also provide the link to the info in the same place. People can choose their poison then.
RE: SEO, web sites aren't free - the hosts usually provide them free of charge to users, but still have to pay significant money to keep the sites running out of the goodness of their hearts. Content = traffic = revenue (if done correctly). This is a necessary evil to keep most sites going.
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As this topic is about a new site though, I think perhaps we'd better restrict chatter to this person's offering, and (if you wish) start new topics about the merits of the various approaches in separate areas.
Personally, I like the idea of having "point and click" maps to find dance classes, and there are lots of things that could be good to enhance the idea - such as "nearest classes to x", mapping from home A to class B, etc. The possibilities are quite fun.
John.
