I've been experimenting with the cool calendaring website Eventful.com. It's an impressive online community-based calendar service with lots of Web2.0 goodness built into it. What's innovative about Eventful is that any user can add events, tag them, and share them with others. Even better, you can export the events to all sorts of other scheduling programs, from Google to Outlook to iCal.
Now here's what's super-cool. Last year, Second Life started sending their events to Eventful automatically. There are to date 266,701 SL events from past six months archived on Eventful, plus another 2,493 listed in the future! This is way more useful than the standard calendar offered on the Second Life in-world interface and their website.
Personally I see this as enormously helpful in keeping track of all the events that I'm interested in, both in the virtual and real worlds. I can add the ones I care about to my personal calendar, and get notified of new ones that I'm interested in via RSS or a widget on my website. Plus I can publish my personal calendar, and export it to my Macs and PC easily.
Beyond personal use, I think Eventful might be very useful in collecting and publishing the SL events that I highlight in my weekly "Events Picks" on New World Notes. I'm going to experiment with using Eventful for next this coming week's events notice and see how it goes.
I have started a "Rik's Event Picks" group on Eventful where I will be adding all of the event's I mention on New World Notes. Feel free to join the group if you would like to be informed of what cool happenings are coming up in the calendar. There's even a teleport SLURL built in, so you can head straight to the venue. Sweet!
