Following up on yesterday’s entry, here is an instance of the calendar aggregator for Ann Arbor, Michigan, a town I lived in for a long time and remember fondly: Events in and around Ann Arbor.

It’s controlled by a Delicious account — delicious.com/a2cal — which I’ll happily relinquish to a more appropriate curator.

There are two primary sources of information. First, events posted to Eventful.com at locations within 15 miles of Ann Arbor. Second, Google calendars that turn up in a search for Ann Arbor.

My notion was that this would be a nice way to bootstrap an instance of the aggregator. Not all the Google calendars will be appropriate, and there are of course many other iCalendar feeds that I don’t know about and can’t easily find. But there’s enough here to serve as a proof of concept, and maybe attract the interest of one or more curators. As a curator, you’d do things like:

  1. Tweak the template and the image. (Josh Band, I cropped your photo just as a placeholder, hope that’s OK.)
  2. Weed out inappropriate feeds.
  3. Add new feeds.
  4. Edit feed titles, and provide url=http://HOMEPAGE tags so that all events link somewhere.

Unfortunately, just as I was gearing up to roll out this approach, the Search Public Calendars feature of Google Calendar went AWOL. (Perhaps, as one commenter suggests, as a security measure.) I had searched out Ann Arbor iCalendar feeds a couple of weeks ago, and saved the list, but that procedure isn’t repeatable now for Ann Arbor or anywhere else.

In any case, I hope this illustrates the idea. One or more curators maintain a list of feeds for a community, and the service aggregates them. If you’d like to play along, create a Delicious account along the lines of delicious.com/elmcity or delicious.com/a2cal and let me know about it.