As promised I have taken on board the feedback from my last post on this subject and looked into the various ideas around maintaining a TechCrunch UK calendar of events. The easiest was to create a Wiki here on TechCrunch UK but it also meant everyone had to come to this site in order to update their information about their event which seemed a little drachonian to me. Of course people could simply email me their event information and I could post it, as I have been doing in the past but this is both time consuming and rather tedious – only because I like to post them as an hcalendar microformat.
The next option was to place a Google Calendar button on this blog which would allow people subscribe to a TechCrunch Google calendar. Although I have made this calendar universally shared for “everyone” to read, the problem is it once again forces people to add their events to this calendar and furthermore I would still need to manually provide various event organisers with “contributor” rights to the calendar.
Ian Forrester kindly created a Google calendar called “London Social Events” based on this shared principal and made a dozen of people running regular events in London “contributors” but this list is by no means comprehensive, so once again it would become beholden on someone i.e me to update the contributor list on a regular basis.
Therefore I finally decided the best option for TechCrunch UK was to use Upcoming.org as many of the people running events already had listed them there and it meant anyone else wanting to create a new event could do so freely without the need for me to intervene.
So what I have personally done is subscribe to a number of events listed in the UK and this list now appears on the right hand side of this blog for now. I am playing with a WordPress plugin that will allow “My Upcoming Events” page to appear in full here on TechCrunch UK. In the meantime you can also choose to subscribe to “my upcoming events” list if that is easier. I also like Upcoming.org because all the events created are microformats which will prove very useful shortly.
Furthermore I have created a TechCrunch UK group that you might like to join? I know there is already a very active London Geeks group which I have joined but I felt that TechCrunch should be representative of the entire UK and so decided to create a TechCrunch group for everyone. Therefore if you are creating an new event, you might like to also send a group notification to this new TechCrunch group? I wonder if I can nest groups within TechCrunch UK?
Finally may I also ask, if you are creating a new event and would like TechCrunch UK to cover it here, could you to use add the tag “TCUK” as this makes it quicker and easier for me to find your event. The other good thing I found about using Upcoming.org is that you can also add any of the events created to your chosen personal calendar – Google, Outlook, My Yahoo, ical (Apple) etc. and add a map using either Yahoo or Google maps.
I hope this works and that it helps everyone? All feedback greatly appreciated.
