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April 22, 2005
Speakin' Geek: Why No "Google Happenings"?
Seems like I have a lot on my mind while driving... I need more co-stars to make this stuff interesting...
Been thinking a lot recently about how there seems to be no "events" search -- no "Google Happenings." Many of the major search engines now have local search, but that isn't cross referenced with time. I think it would be useful to be able to aggregate, search, and sort events, and a simple events markup might really go a long way if it were implemented and widely adopted.
The end clip is Marc Canter at a gathering prior to Vloggercon.
After posting this, I noticed CivicSpace is hard at work developing something similar to what I'm talking about.
And then 2 minutes after that, I discover Upcoming.org. Hallelujah!
Posted by jkinberg at April 22, 2005 10:01 PM
Comments
Also EVDB.
Posted by: ryan king at April 23, 2005 1:51 AM
hey, it's true that there's no good google happenings or similar...
but xcal, or ical, or outlook express, or ipod, or yahoo calendar, and palm, all use the .ics format... AFAIK an open source format.
the tricky thing is that calendars are considered something private, when you put network on it, you have a LOT of problems... is it important? to whom? where is it? who's invited?
maybe a social software built on networks could be a good idea... now that meetup.com is paid, maybe the peoply flocking to another service is incentive enought for a service update.
Posted by: nicholas Frota at April 24, 2005 3:47 AM
You're correct about .ics as a calendar format. And the way calendar applications are used, they are private stuff. Often what people put in their calendars are not actually "events". So perhaps looking towards calendars is somewhat of a red herring...
But, there definitely needs to be some kind of simple markup or schema to specify metadata about public events so that they can be shared, aggregated, searched, sorted, etc...
Posted by: Josh at April 24, 2005 8:23 AM
this is a good idea.
what a way to connect.
if im going to nashville next week...how do i know where to go?
Posted by: Jay Dedman at April 25, 2005 10:56 AM
You are so hot when you talk schemas. More!
Posted by: jonny goldstein at May 29, 2005 10:31 PM
Upcoming.org is definitely worth a look. It's been getting a lot of new features recently, including an API that allows you to build applications that use the data it has to offer. All cool stuff...
Posted by: Pete Prodoehl at June 7, 2005 5:16 PM
Josh,
We're working on a app that does this for a specific vertical market right now. Let me know if you are interested in getting involved.
Posted by: TaulPaul at July 7, 2005 11:18 PM
Josh,
Your analysis of xCal and RSSEvents as effectively "abandoned" is spot on.
As far as publishing calendaring information on the *Web*, take a look at hCalendar, a 1:1 mapping of the iCalendar standard (RFC 2445) into semantic XHTML: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar
EVDB and Upcoming.org are already publishing all their events in hCalendar.
And as far as your scenario of a blogger publishing events in their blogroll, I've got an "Event Roll" that does just that on my blog: http://tantek.com/log/
It was great meeting you this past weekend, and I look forward to working with you on microformats.
Tantek
Posted by: Tantek at August 22, 2005 9:45 PM
I am the Founder of 
