This week a new company released their event announcement service to the D.C. technology scene. A little bit of buzz began circulating about this new service (DC Gary’s Guide) that Gary Sharma announced to a few people early on in the week. The site is GarysGuide.org (named after the founder) and it attempts to track all of the technology and new media events going on.

It started off with New York and then Boston but has since expanded to D.C. Among those that are active in the new media crowd here in D.C. there is another site that many of us turn to for event information: DC Tech Events. Ross Karchner has been running the site as a hobby for the past couple years and has kept it extremely simple. Every time he posts out an event, the information is distributed via Twitter and via email thanks to Feedburner.

That’s as far as it goes. Gary is taking it one step further by providing daily and weekly newsletters that highlight events as well as new job postings on the site. The only problem as of now is that Gary doesn’t have much of a reach in D.C. That may soon change as people become familiar with the site. It’s well designed and constantly maintained making it equally reliable to DC Tech Events with the addition of job postings.

When it comes to design and usability, Gary may have the upper hand but Ross Karchner currently has the reach. Across all of DC, I would argue that there is nobody that has completely dominated the event directory when it comes to leveraging all the distribution channels possible. Did Gary just bust open the door for competition? Who will win? Who do you support?

Update
It’s clear that I jumped the gun on this one and should have looked into this more. Apparently Gary is an aggressive spammer. While I think the design of the site is great, it’s clear that D.C. supports Ross Karchner and DC Tech Events. As a policy from now on Social Times will do the same thing given Ross’ thorough coverage of tech events taking place in D.C. Hopefully my week ending sensationalistic headline didn’t do too much to harm D.C. Tech Events!