Saturday 2 August 2008

Tango calendar - shelved

Having played about with Google Calendar a bit, and sought opinions, I don't think the idea is viable.

It's obvious that it would be far too much work for one person to maintain and keep accurate. Even if someone did it, I wouldn't trust the results. There have been attempts at creating central calendars, some of which allow organisers to maintain their own data, which is the only way such a tool could possibly work. But none of them has gained enough scale to show up in searches. I think there's someone working on a new one, and I'll leave it to him.

Google calendar is rather convenient, and it's well used, for example, here. But I was assuming that it allowed you to aggregate calendars automatically in a way that doesn't appear to work yet once you embed it on a website. I'd still encourage people to try it for their own calendars. The display is all taken care of, and it's much less work than maintaining something like, as a typical example, this. It does give people the option to add your events to their own personal diaries, as well as search for them, and it's very straightforward to embed.

Aggregation could be made to work if enough people used the same or compatible tools. But I don't think it's ready to aggregate yet.

However, I've had another idea which works much better for me. It's only a glorified link list, but I think it's a nice enhancement for my own milonga reviews, and it can grow slowly with them. See next post for my better-idea Milonga Map.

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