Upcoming.org is an interesting collaborative events listing social network site, that received a lot of attention recently because its events lists (personalized and by metro) are available as RSS feeds.

I think you can see my Upcoming.org user profile without a password. If you are in the Bay Area (or LA) add me as a friend on Upcoming.org, and leave a comment here if you are on Upcoming too so I can add you as friend.

This RSS events feed reminded everyone of how neat it might be to create and get calendar notifications via RSS, which I mentioned in July in my RSS Schedulin' your idea post. This also brought up issues about standard ways to represent calendar events.

Marc Canter is really into this, and he quoted lots of good stuff in his blog, which I summarize here:

• We need standards for Calendar Events with comments on and links to this post from Ray Ozzie which started it all (and which links to the Upcoming.org review on Many 2 Many which really started it all)
• How would we do Calendar Events with RSS 2.0? with good stuff on the RDF iCalendar from Libby Miller via Danny Ayers' Ozzie gets his calendar
• More Calendar Events stuff with a big quote from Russell Beattie's iCal Redux 2003
• OK - we know how David feels, but what about the other Dave? with comments on and links to David Galbraith's RSS calendar events
• and a summary diagram just so we're clear

There are several issues getting mixed up in this, which I think basically fall into the three categories of:

1. what are the standard ways to represent all kinds of calendar events
2. what are the ways in which those events can be shared between multiple parties
3. what are the ways in which parties can be notified of events

While I think RSS can play an interesting role in this, I think the RSS isn't going to be able to address all three of those categories of issues, and maybe, at best, only most of the third category on notification.

What I think is interesting about the RSS / feed reader combo is that they are a polling mechanism that, on the web, work incredibly well for a number of things.

Why not just aspire to a situation where people can post standard formatted calendar files and have calendar readers? In that case, you don't need the RSS file format at all, but it is the same RSS / reader pattern.