Primordial Ooze

Bear with me…

Tim Bray inspired this post with his PHP Calendar Fun post…

Mozilla Sunbird can subscribe to iCal files on the web. In fact, you can subscribe to multiple iCal files and Sunbird will merge them. If I’m not mistaken, the Apple iCalendar application uses this format and I imagine invented it. Yep.

Say I want to share my calendar with my wife. I do this now with WebDAV on my personal web server (primordia.com). I’d rather use a Web 2.0 “calendar service”, call it cal.endar.us. cal.endar.us which lets me host my calendar which I can share and grant write access to permissioned people. Subscribers would see a complete iCal file on the web but it would be dynamically generated with each request based on the latest event information on the site.

One step further… cal.endar.us could support a Web UI to enter events. Subscribers to the iCal files will automatically get updates as they refresh their calendars. This way I or others can add events to my calendar while traveling or otherwise away from a client with something like Sunbird installed. Though, check out Portable Sunbird.

One step further… calendar events and entries get taggified. These tags can be used to create virtual iCal subscriptions. I want to subscribe to an iCal composed of “concert” and “Brooklyn”. You can share tags with friends and look at what the community at large is tagging. [Insert the rest of the advantages of social bookmarking here]

One step further… RSS feeds of bands or other social groups can have their normal blog feeds parsed for dates. The cal.endar.us can subscribe to these feeds and compose tagged entries. Some junk will likely get in until a standard for calendar/event extension to RSS or Atom is developed. Maybe the capability is already there.

So let’s talk about syndicated calendar events. RSScal? AtomCal? CalAtom? Pop syndicated event functionality into Sunbird or iCalendar and events can stream in. Multiple streams can be subscribed to just like multiple iCal files can be subscribed.

A little digging brought me to Technorati hCalendar events (beta). This seems exactly like what I’m describing here, better even. hCalendar seems pretty cool:

This specification introduces the hCalendar format, which is a 1:1 representation of the aforementioned iCalendar standard, in semantic XHTML. Bloggers can both embed hCalendar events directly in their web pages, and style them with CSS to make them appear as desired. In addition, hCalendar enables applications to retrieve information about such events directly from web pages without having to reference a separate file.

Still, I wonder if there is opportunity beyond what technorati is currently offering. It still seems to require a tech-savvy user to make effective use of the service. Not something I’d direct my mom to.