With their book, 100 Things to Do Before You Die, published in 1999, Neil Teplica and Dave Freeman, who has died after a fall, created a vogue for lists of activities that pushed against the envelope of natural human indolence and encouraged an adventurous approach to travel.

Many of the pair’s suggestions, which had grown out of a travel website they founded in 1996, were actually of a worthily cultural sort and need not have raised an eyebrow. Its sections, marked by explanatory logos (Freeman’s inspiration) that ranged from “Grandma approved” through “down and dirty” to “potential to see blood”, invited readers to visit events that might include something as comfortably familiar as the Academy Awards ceremony, the Pamplona bull running — likely to set grandma’s pulse racing in alarm — and the Sydney Fringe Festival’s night nude surfing competition held at Bondi Beach.

Freeman’s own favourite in terms of sheer eccentricity was something he called “land diving on the tiny island in the Pacific called Vanuatu”. This highly perilous precursor to bungee jumping is carried out by naked contestants on Pentecost Island in the Vanuatu chain, who hurl themselves from the top of ricketty 25m high towers constructed of branches, hoping that the vines which secure their ankles will retain enough sappy springiness to break their fall. Fatalities have been known. Between them Freeman and Teplica visited most of the 100 events and sites covered by their book, though participation in some of the most dangerous of the former was not in their remit.

David Stewart Freeman was born in Whittier, near Los Angeles, in 1961, and educated at the University of Southern California where he took a degree in urban planning in 1983.

After three years working at an advertising agency in Newport Beach, he moved to New York where he worked for Grey Advertising. Teaming up with Teplica, a real estate broker, he co-founded WhatsGoingOn.com, a Forbes Top 36 website focusing on festivals and events worldwide. It closed in 2001.

Freeman had been sitting eating breakfast in his sixth-floor apartment when, on the morning of September 11, that year, he witnessed the suicide airliner attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. The catastrophe troubled him deeply and the following year he moved back to the Los Angeles area to be near his family, and work for an advertising agency.

He is survived by his father, a stepmother and a sister.

Dave Freeman, advertising executive and author, was born on February 21, 1961. He died after a fall on August 17, 2008, aged 47