the elmcity project

Events in Keene, NH: Spring 2005

Events in Keene, NH: Summer 2009Built on Microsoft Azure

Data flows in from: Eventful.com Upcoming.org A curated list of iCalendar “feeds”

Data flows out to: HTML, XML, JSON, iCalendar

Not a databaseNot a destination site

A syndication hub

Actually, a growing collection of hubs

Intertwined history with upcoming.org

2

1

3

From groupware to social information management

2009 iCal

RFC2445

1999 NNTPRFC 977

“It was one of the books I'm proudest of publishing, despite its commercial failure. It was just too far ahead of its time.”

- Tim O’Reilly, Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?

elmcity ?

outcomeyear standard project

publish subscribe aggregate

RSSRadio UserLand NetNewsWireBloglinesGoogle ReaderMany others

NetscapeRadio UserLandMeerkatBloglinesTechnoratiPlanetMany others

Radio UserLandTypePadWordPressMany others

ICS

CalagatorelmcityOthers?

Google CalendarOutlookApple iCalLive CalendarDrupalOthers

Google CalendarOutlookApple iCalLive CalendarOthers

RSS feeds, iCalendar feeds

The standard is 10 years old!

But it was late to the personal publishing party.

It only recently become possible to publish an iCalendar “feed” using:

Google CalendarOutlookApple iCalDrupal

And hardly anybody knows this.

Why iCalendar? Why now?

Right thing: Feed. Wrong way: RSS.

The date and time must be here, right?

Wrong. It’s nowhere to be found. (RSS link just points back to page)

Bookmarking metadata in Delicious

Step 1: Designate a Delicious accounte.g.: prescottaz, for Prescott, Arizona

Step 2: Bookmark a metadata URLe.g.: http://delicious.com/prescottaz/metadata

Step 3: Tag it with location, timezone

… are also controlled in Delicious

Other metadata defaults…tz=Easterntitle=event+calendarcontact=nobody_yetimg=http://elmcity.info/media/img/keene-night-360.jpgcss=http://jonudell.net/css/elmcity.css template=http://jonudell.net/tmpl_events.tmpl radius=5

Bookmarking feeds in Delicious

http://delicious.com/elmcity/trusted+ics+feed

Default event URL and category. (Individual events often don’t provide, will inherit, can augment.)

Trusting contributors1. Curator monitors RSS feed for previously unseen contributors (e.g., to Eventful or Upcoming).

2. Clicks through to view contributions to that service.

3. If deemed trustworthy, bookmarks contributor’s URL in that service, assigns (revocable) trust tags.

Other possible ways to curate metadata

Fielded Wiki?

{{ElmcityAggregator|where=keene,nh|tz=Eastern|radius=15|title=Events in and Around Keene}}

Semantic wiki?

Goal: Support any source of name/value pairs that people will happily use.

Open infrastructure

Collaborating in FriendFeed

Where do iCalendar feeds come from?

Sometimes curators create them.

Sometimes curators can find them.

In RSS terms, the iCalendar ecosystem is at roughly a 2001 stage of development.

Guerilla feed creation: FuseCal

DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20090704BEGIN:VEVENTURL:http://www.stonewallfarm.org/events.html

Guerilla feed creation: FuseCal

Most calendar info online is HTML only.

FuseCal finds titles, dates and times.

And exports ICS.

Guerilla feed creation: MySpace1. Visit myspace.com/lonesomelake

2. Open the all events link: http://collect.myspace.com....69161&n=lonesome+lake

3. Give it to FuseCal

4. Filter the results by Keene

5. Export the iCalendar URL

6. Add that URL to the Delicious registry with these tags:

trusted ics feed url=http://fusecal.com/calendar/ical/4001823?h3-00163e2867e6 category=music

Now, even though MySpace does not export ICS, or do location query, wehave this band's Keene events flowing through the hub.

Guerilla feed creation: Finding implicit recurring events and making them explicit

1. Robot searches Google and Bing for: {every|first|second|third|fourth|last} {monday|tuesday|wednesday|thursday|friday|saturday|sunday} keene,nh2. Curator eyeballs results looking for recurring events3. Sample result text, from a PDF file:

NSD – 2009_02_Issue.indd Recreation Center, 312 Washington St., Keene, NH. Western Style Square Dance Apparel ….. “We have a dance every first and third Saturday, no matter what!!!”

4. Actual source of date/time info5. Implied recurring event made explicit

Guerilla feed creation: Light up hidden feeds

Google CalendarMost Drupal sites. Some library systems.Assorted other content management systems.

A variety of popular web calendars do offer ICS feeds, including:

The operators of these systems typically won’t know that.

Curators can bring this hidden feeds to light.

Just by bookmarking them!

Downstream syndication to the web

Syndication to community cable TV

Chess club

High school principal

Traveling minstrel

Square dancers

True stories

Chess club: Right time, wrong place

Keene Sentinel: Monday night chess club, 6:30 PM, Best Western Hotel

Eventful.com: Monday night chess club, 6:30 PM, E.F. Lane Hotel

Nope.

It moved.

The chess club does not expect to be the authoritative producer of a feed about itself.

The newspaper does not expect to consume such a feed.

Both expectations need to change.

High school: “We posted weekly.pdf to the website. Isn’t that good enough?”

Communications Committee, Tuesday at 5:30, Cheshire Career Center Conference Room, KHS

DTSTART:20080617T173000 SUMMARY:Communications Committee LOCATION:KHS , Cheshire Career Center Conference Room

PDF

ICS

The difference matters.

Our educators need to understand it.

And then teach it.

Computational thinking

More computational thinking

Indirection: Please don't give me a copy of your information. Give me a link to it instead, so I can respect your authority.Syndication: Your HTML and PDF pages won't flow through the syndication network. Your iCalendar feed will.Structure: If you make me guess the date and time, I'll guess wrong.Abstraction: We can use any URL as a rendezvous for social information management. We can even invent imaginary ones just for this purpose.Query

Q: Which Eventful venues are feeding into the Providence hub? A: http://delicious.com/mashablecity/venue=eventfulQ: What are the government-related feeds for Prescott? A: http://delicious.com/prescottaz/category=governmentQ: Where is music happening in Huntington? A: http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/whyhuntington/html/music

“Lohan may have been bored, but she wasn’t dumb. She tagged E! correspondent Ben Lyons and gossip blogger Perez Hilton in the photo’s caption.”http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/06/17/2009-06-7_lindsay_lohan_posts_topless picture_on_twitter.html

Lindsay Lohan posts topless picture on Twitter

Computational thinking in the mainstream

Because Keene’s aggregator subscribes to Eventful events in Keene, Beau appeared on the calendar – without effort, without even realizing it.

What if the other 20 cities on his tour were listening to their channels?

Minstrel: Beau Bristow in Keene

I’m looking to partner with:

NewspapersLibrariesSchools

More info:

http://elmcity.cloudapp.net

http://delicious.com/judell/elmcity+azure

jonu@microsoft.com