I recently volunteered to post events for a local organization across various event websites. In the process, I started thinking about how no particular event site really seems to be standing out at this point in time. You can find events listings everywhere: MySpace, Facebook, your local newspaper sites, Eventful, Upcoming, Meetup, Google Calendars, etc. But you either have to check them all frequently to stay on top of what's posted on each, or subscribe to rss feeds for your interests at all of them and wade through them in your reader, which may speed up the process but doesn't lend itself to spontaneous browsing. To make it easier on those looking for events, most of these events sites have ways for the user to export the event to a calendar, email, and/or social networking site. As an event creator, though, what I really need is a tool that will allow me to create an event once and then post it to all these other sites without having to re-create it on each.
I've spent the last 3 days looking for such a tool and can't find one. I did find a good summary of my problem posted on Microformats, so at least I know I'm not the only one noticing a lack of options for this situation. If I knew more programming, it seems like it'd be easy for me to create something that would do this for me. After all, if users can push information to their many online profiles and accounts, how can there not be an event aggregator publishing tool? Plus, it looks like most of the sites use the hcalendar markup standard. Maybe I'm just missing something.
Perhpas there is a for-fee service somewhere. Mashable's list of 35 tools for events had a few for businesses that hinted at being able to do such a thing, for a fee.
I'm investigating Microsoft/Windows Live to see if there's anything there that might help. I will continue to do more research to see if there's already a freely available tool for this out there. In the meantime, maybe the best I can do is customize a startup page for myself that includes all the sites where I will post events listings.
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