[Noisebridge-discuss] Event callenders?

[Shannon Clark]

One thing I do which helps - but isn't quite ideal is I use Google
Calendar's ability to pull in .ics (iCalendar) files from elsewhere and
consolidate a bunch of calendars into my one Google Calendar view (which is
then nicely available via a pretty good iPhone interface)
I pull in two calendars from upcoming (my friend's events and a feed of the
actual events I have marked myself as attending - Google can include
authenticated calendars)

I also include my Facebook Calendar (which increasingly really is the one
that reflects events I have RSVPed for etc, a calendar from Borderlands
Books, and a number of public (and in one case private but to which I have
been given access) calendars maintained by friends of mine of tech events
around town.

Not ideal, but at least I can view everything in one interface.

iPhone v3.0 will have the native ability to connect to .ics which could open
up this technique in a number of newer and more innovative ways - ideally
I'll be able to do much the same thing but all within the native iPhone
calendar - which in turn could mean that I can set alerts based on some
events etc.

Calendars are still a really messy, complex place. in 2000 I started a
company with the goal of building a calendar that could update itself - at
the time there were few good calendar interfaces so I both had to build an
entire web based calendaring platform and had to build the techniques to
extract structured, calendar data from semi-structured sources (mostly
websites). I built most of it but never found a business model so haven't
been working on it since around 2004.

That said, I am quite passionate about this area and have been thinking
about revisiting it, seeing what it would take to bring my code and
techniques up to date for the current web (my code was in PHP4 so would also
have to do some language updating). The growth of microformats is helpful,
as are the increasing range of calendars (in iCalendar format) available -
though the standards for how to access them (to for example request "what is
new on this calendar since my last connection") are still evolving and not
fixed as full Internet standards (for that matter iCalendar itself is still
as far as I know not fixed - I was briefly an editor of the standard)

Calendars (and Scheduling which is related but different) is an area which
seems like it should be solveable, which seems simple, but which is anything
but - and which has dozens upon dozens of gotchas, baked in assumptions,
alternative approaches (which are all reasonable but not always compatible)
and more pitfalls to navigate.

A few brainteasers to illustrate:

How many hours are there in a day? (hint the answer is NOT 24)

Are these the same thing:

An event starts at 10pm and goes for 4 hours

vs

An event starts at 10pm and ends at 2am?

(hint these two questions are related)

More simple - if you tell me the call is starting at 9am what ELSE do we
both need to know?

Did you realize that there is no standard way to communicate that bit which
is missing?

The big issue with calendar (well one) is that Calendars deal with Geography
and physical location as well as time. A related issue is that people's
intentions and purposes behind publishing a calendar or maintaining it
differ quite widely - and in that difference are lots of built in
assumptions, different comfort levels with ambiguity, and in many ways
different views of the world and even of the same event(s).

- i.e. I might care only about a specific session occurring during a
conference - so put just that session into my calendar (and might want to
view all of the available sessions) while other people (or myself in other
contexts) might just note that the conference is happening over a range of
days and not get more precise than that) both approaches are valid and
useful - but also show the complexity and different assumptions. Similarly
there are often cases where events need to be linked to each other in some
manner - but how this happens may also need to differ.

To illustrate:

- since I moved from Chicago to CA my calendar (well some of them) is no
longer useful for keeping track of when my friends have birthdays because
due to an errant sync at some point I now have birthdays which stretch over
multiple days (because they were somewhere assumed to have a fixed start &
end time - which changed when I changed timezones)

- There are services which show when say concerts are happening (best case
in a given geographic region) but also including the exact day & time when
tickets go on sale would be a bit more useful - but that last bit is still
today nearly impossible to find consistently.

Shannon
Founder, Nearness Function - strategic consulting, brand advertising &
sponsorships
Twitter - rycaut
Blogs: Slow Brand - http://slowbrand.com
Searching for the Moon - http://shannonclark.wordpress.com


On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Rubin Abdi <rubin at starset.net> wrote:

> meredith scheff wrote, On 2009/04/13 18:30:
>
>> Anyone know of good resources for these?
>>
>
> http://upcoming.org/
> http://laughingsquid.com/squidlist/events/
>
> --
> Rubin Abdi
> rubin at starset.net
>
> _______________________________________________
> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>
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