Internet Date Book

My girlfriend runs the DIY Alert website (http://www.diyalert.com), which has a nice calendar of all the craft-ortiented events going on in and around the greater Portland, Oregon area. It's a neat site, and I think it serves the crafting community well.

It has been running less than a year, and already we are seeing "synergistic" benefits that we didn't anticipate. For example, if I am a shop owner or craft event organizer, I can just pull up the main page of the site to see the distribution of craft classes (and their different types) over the month. It is then easy to see that offering a knitting class on Saturday is not a great idea - there are nine of them already. But on Monday! Aha!

If the local shops and class-offering folk were to use this tool to see what has over-saturated and when, the entire area would end up with (a) a much better balance of classes and (b) a much better time-availability for classes - offering them at times that aren't in competition with other events. Result: higher enrollments, better selection of classes, and a schedule that allows more people to participate and attend. The *entire* local crafting economy would be boosted by this. I say that because the craft-class organizers are always complaining of low turnout.

So here we have a tool that brings visbility and easy coordination that just wasn't possible before - as well as additional exposure. This is the kind of thing that the Internet was invented for; this is the virtue of the tool. And this was an unintended side benefit!

Also, it has become clear that we need some kind of standard date-event XML format that works like RSS (or could even be considered to be an RSS feed). This is so dates and events from one site could be machine-read and compiled on another, complete with updates and info. Right now, shop owners have three or four places to enter their class info, repeating it, and not updating (usually) more than one source with changes (which sometimes occur weeks after the original listing). It only takes once or twice for someone to show up to an event that has been cancelled for that person to back off on going to events all around. It's killing the excitement around get-togethers and it is labelling Portland as a town of flakey crafters. Events are getting a reputation as unreliable just because people can't get the word about changes and cancellations.

The amount of work it takes to build one month of calendar on DIY Alert - entering between 300 and 600 events - is big. Much bigger than the amount of revenue the site produces. It doesn't have to be - if we had date-interchange RSS plug-ins for Drupal, Word Press, and a couple of others, then events could be automatically transferred and published all around. Newspaper sites and community sites would be able to present current information *with no labor costs* - creating listings far more complete than what they do now.

Everyone benefits. The publishers still have control over what goes into the feed and what doesn't. And the whole world gets a giant calendar of events of all kinds. How nice it would be for me to wake up on Saturday morning, type "juggling" into an RSS feed search engine, and see what events I could go to this morning, right now, right when I feel like it. It'll increase turn out, excitement, connection, community, and our fun!