Let's get organized

Isn't it frustrating to find out too late about an interesting event that you'd like to have attended had you known about it in time?

Every day now Irish bloggers are posting information about upcoming seminars, exhibitions and other events, usually pointing back to the event website for further information. This is great but its a headache keeping track of everything.

Upcoming.org offers a terrific solution to this problem with three features in particular that make it ideal -

1. RSS for everything: You can subscribe to Events notifications by metro (city), venue, and tag.
2. Tagging: You can apply your own tags to any event and sort by tag.
   
3. Synchronization: You can easily add any item to an iCal Calendar. And 30boxes offers direct account synchronization.

Let's look at how these features can work together to help us get organized. I've started maintaining a Sustainability node for the Open Irish Directory (under Health & Environment). Looking at the Events & Exhibitions subnode you'll see a list of upcoming seminars around the country. You can view All or by Region.

For example, take the Waste Seminar for Small to Medium Business in Limerick (spotted on the Race Against Waste website). You'll see that this event has two tags - oidhse and oidhselk. The letters 'oid' signify that the event is suited for the Open Irish Directory. The 'h' says it comes under the Health & Environment node, the 's' indicates the Sustainability subnode and the 'e' obviously points to the Events and Exhibitions category. The 'lk' of the second tag further channels the same item to a node for Limerick based events. Of course you can always add whatever tags make sense to you.

I've used the same features to build an Events & Exhibitions node for the Information & Technology category. Currently listed are the Practical Business uses of RSS event (as blogged by Tom Raftery) and ICTexpo 2006.

Another example. Under the 'Recreation & Sport -> Entertainment -> Music' hierarchy you'll see a new Gig Guide. Click on the Dublin subnode to view all the upcoming gigs in Dublin sorted by venue.

If you use 30Boxes just sign up for a free Upcoming.org account to sync any of these events to your calendar. And finally, please help us to get more organised by adding your own events of interest, tagging them and requesting us to add them into the directory. Of course, if they require a new node you might also consider building and hosting that node for free with OPMLworkstation. Thanks.

Comments

[Tom Raftery]

Nice one James