Clogging
No-one seems to have come up with this yet - so here it is from me. Calendar Blogging or “Clogging”. When Apple brought out iCal they really started a new wave of “blogging”. Sites such as icalshare.com are springing up where you can subscribe to calendars of such interesting things as public holidays or sports events. And you can publish your calendar there. At the moment these are “generic” calendars.
But the next step - and this is what clogging is all about - is the “worship my personal calendar” aspect. Famous people (me included - yeah right) will publish their own calendars containing dates and things they find interesting.
“Followers” then subscribe to the calendar of their star and can celebrate such things as their star’s birthday or when the calendar author has a dentist appointment. Imagine postings to weblogs following say Doc Searls with such notes as “remember, check your Doc Searls calendar - today he his having his wisdom tooth out at 10 am Pacific.”. Wow - the mind boggles. Ok, so perhaps Doc doesn’t have a wisdom tooth left to be pulled (joke). Another example: My calendar entry for today would read “1:15 pm - Pick up kids from school”. All my fans could subscribe and then send me emails of sympathy at 1:00 pm :-). Imagine the clogging entry for Linus Torvalds “10th November - 10:00 am - new Kernel version. 10:30 am - another new Kernel version”. And we would know and light candles at 9:45. On IRC we could then meet at 9:55 and count down the remaining minutes.
It will happen. Must rush - I have a calendar to author.
Clogging - when will you publish your calendar for us?
More Calendars
You can find more calendars (and lots of other .Mac stuff) at:
http://www.dotmac.info
Prior art and future directions.
First off, My Yahoo! Calendar has let you selectively publish your personal events as web pages for 4 years. The ietf work on calendaring and scheduling goes back further. And the iCal format is even older. http://www.ecal.com/ syndicates events now.
Apple's contribution: making something that works, that's uses the standards, with an instant critical mass.
It's a small step for Craigslist and Blogger and Radio to make it easy to share events. Give Outlook and Palm a few months and they'll be in on the game too. Imagine a world swarming in events, from the mundane to the system-generated to the spiritual to the world series. Monster with job interviews. The History channel with an almanac. PayPal with payment reminders.
The challenges: discovery (find events that interest me), navigation (wading through calSpace), geocoding (show me events happening downtown), subscription (Microsoft press conferences), authentication, commerce ($5 per year for 24-hour advance notification when my favorite stars are available for paparazzi shots), translation (language, format, calendaring system).
Keep up the enthusiasm. And where is your calendar?