Comments on: Allman Brothers, Oct 14: Huntington or Nashville? A parable about syndication and provenance.

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:44:04 +0000

“what seems to be missing are ‘dead simple’ tools to take a list of events and publish them as iCalendar-enabled web pages”

Yes, a critical capability. It already exists in at least two places that are web-based and free:

1. Google Calendar

2. Windows Live Calendar

Both of these can ingest data from calendar software, and publish to ICS and HTML endpoints.

“Outlook, spreadsheet, .csv, whatever”

Here I would quibble. The source should be one of the many calendar programs that emit iCalendar data. That’s the only reliable exchange pattern. With a spreadsheet, a csv, or a ‘whatever’ there’s no standard interpretation of what those files contain.

By: Pigsaw Blog » Blog Archive » Bookmarks for 19 Oct 2009

Pigsaw Blog » Blog Archive » Bookmarks for 19 Oct 2009 — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:01:45 +0000

[...] Allman Brothers, Oct 14: Huntington or Nashville? A parable about syndication and provenance. «…"It appears the Allman Brothers were in concert today, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t. [...] At AllmanBrothersBand.com it says they were in Nashville on October 14. But if that’s true, Eventful isn’t the only site that got it wrong date. So, apparently, did a number of event-gathering and ticket-selling sites. Here are couple of examples I found. [...]

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:59:58 +0000

I think I’ve posted this before – but what seems to be missing are ‘dead simple’ tools to take a list of events and publish them as iCalendar-enabled web pages. In my opinion, the tool would enable someone to select multiple events from somewhere (Outlook, spreadsheet, .csv, whatever) for N events publish to one site N+1 .ics files, one for each event, one containing all events, AND an XML file describing them with a reference to a matching stylesheet (to enable HTML viewing of the events too).
The iCalendar files could be eliminated if browsers and javascript enabled you to open text+icalendar files but the last I checked you could only do an open on text.

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:14:42 +0000

Thanks Greg. I really think so, obviously. Of course you can’t really drive adoption because it has a mind of its own. So the real trick I still need to learn is how to invite it in a compelling way.

By: links for 2009-10-15 | GFMorris.com

links for 2009-10-15 | GFMorris.com — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:30:21 +0000

[...] Allman Brothers, Oct 14: Huntington or Nashville? A parable about syndication and provenance. « Jon… "Why don’t more content management systems make event information available as useful data? Why do they instead advertise things like XHTML compliance and not-very-useful RSS feeds? Because, chicken-and-egg, nobody ever seems to expect an iCalendar feed. [...]

By: Greg Martin

Greg Martin — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:22:24 +0000

Jon, it’s amazing how easy this is to see once you understand it. There could be an amazing interweb of event information if we can drive adoption forward.

\\Greg