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Face-to-face: calendaring

July 24th, 2009 written by Jeff Hershberger

My favorite subject to hammer on is that of using social media to get out and meet people face-to-face. This was the subject of my eBook chapter and the talk I gave at the launch party. But in order to meet people, you have to be in the same place at the same time. In snow belt cities like Cleveland, people pack in a year's worth of activities into six months, so there can be a lot of scheduling conflicts. What to do?

In discussions with Susie Sharp, we uncovered a couple of event listings aggregators, Upcoming and Eventful. My initial impression was that Eventful has a really comprehensive listing of live music venues and events, and Upcoming's music coverage is incomplete but it has more of other types of events. Both of these sites provide feeds that can be viewed in your Google Calendar (either directly or via an iCal feed). At this blog post I give step-by-step instructions on how to implement that.

For my own calendar, my favorite live music venues and Meetup.com groups are now visible. What else is there? Ironically, the Cleveland Social Media Club currently offers only an RSS feed of events, but that's probably fixable. I think next I'll look into my LinkedIn groups to see if they have feeds. I've enjoyed a couple of those networking events.

Google is, I think, the king of viewer software. Google Reader is a great RSS feed viewer (though not flawless) and now Google Calendar is showing me all my social options.

Topics: Social Media Blog