Further to my earlier rant on employment web sites, I have a beef with community association web sites. Every industry association, trade association, and online community inevitably has an event calendar. The problem is that there is no single source for event information within the Vancouver technology community (or any other community for that matter).
Now I’m not suggesting that it’s either possible or practical for a site such as BC Technology to scour every association and society’s event calendars, and screen scrape the data to get it into their own event calendar. That would be silly. However, we’ve got these new fangled com-pu-ters I’ve been hearing about, and the word on the street is that they’re pretty handy at amalgamating data on their own, provided you give them some common format for exchanging data.
Waitaminute. Computers? Data? Format? That’s sound suspiciously like a prime candidate for an XML application!
Imagine: You’re interested in the local tech community and you know a few sites that have information on the events you care about. Instead of surfing to their web sites periodically, wouldn’t it make more sense if you could simply subscribe to their event calendar from within your calendaring application (for example: Outlook). This syndication of event calendars would mirror the way RSS is currently used to syndicate blogs. The calendaring application would become an event information aggregator, thus freeing me from ever missing an event.
Of course, I’m not the first person to think of this. Those crafty people at Apple were ahead of the game, as usual, when they enabled publication of iCalendar files through their .Mac service. But they didn’t quite take it far enough and were, unfortunately, just too damn smart for the rest of the world to follow suit. Recently, others have started an XML calendar format based on RDF. Here’s hoping they succeed sometime soon, so I can start spending more time at the events than I do trying to find out about the events.