On Facebook, on the left-hand side, click on “Events”.


On the page that loads, scroll down to the bottom, click on “Export Events” and copy that URL.

Open up Google Calendar. Under “other Calendars” on the left click on “Add”. Choose “Add by URL. Paste the FB URL in there. Choose “Add Calendar”.

In about 5-10 minutes the events will start showing up and after that any events you accept on FB will automatically flow to Google Calendar.

In a blog entry by Guy Kawasaki entitled “Is Advertising Dead?” he discussed a Churchill Club panel that he moderated called Next Generation Insights (video available. Worth viewing all the way through).
In particular in the blog entry Guy noted that to the panelists:
“Helio is the hot phone (though none of them had one). I had never heard of it before!”
I thought about it for a while and I think this is an example of Advertising actually working. *gasp* I know.. I know.. stick with me here.
None of them had a Helio. But it was the coolest thing -ever-.
**Many years ago I got called the “Evil Queen of Ads”. I guess the evilness is rubbing off on me.

I own both a home stereo and a digital-music player. In fact even before the players were digital I owned a portable music player. I’m a proud member of the “walkman” generation.
If they wanted to make a stronger arguement they should have compared home stereo sales with the sales of the plug-in bases for digital-music players, like the Klipsch iGroove. -That- would be an either-or situation.
Even with the misleading facts, I still think this move is inevitable. CDs are moving towards the status of premptive archive. You won’t keep the CD to listen to the music.. you’ll keep the CD so that if your digital music file gets corrupted you’ll be able to re-write it from your “backup” (that and to prove that you paid for the music).
What we need is a way for the digital storage system to make intelligent decisions about what music to play. Crafting a play list is tedious. I don’t want to have to do the work -and- I really want to be surprised when a song comes on. Pandora has it right.. but I want Pandora to arrange -my- music.. not just random music in its library.
I’m not passionate about music. I like music but I don’t live-eat-breath music. I don’t want to have to go through and tag all of my .mp3s. I want everyone in the world to do it for me. I’m imagining a central repository that has song-title, artist, record, etc and allows anyone to add a tag to any song.
Then I want to be able to tell my digital music player to play “sad” songs and have it cycle through my .mp3s looking for those that have been tagged “sad”.
The Ipod (or mp3 player) shouldn’t be the end-all replacement for the home stereo.. it should be the mobile carrying device for some of your music. Your music should be stored in some of that infinite storage space that the Internet provides. Your devices should know how to intelligently access it.

Somethings really don’t change. I pulled up the homepage for the web design company I ran from 1997-2001 on the “Internet Way Back Machine“. I was one of the very few web designers in Montana from 1997-2001 (when I relocated to California)
Anyway, back in the day I was a cheeky young college student (and then College instructor) with visions of the Internet infiltrating our lives. In between mochas at the local coffee shop and “Foundations of Logic” I wrote up this article in an attempt to attract web design contracts.

Written January 1999:

What are the three things that will either make or break your internet site?

Content

Of the three, Content is king. Content is the new buzzword for stuff-that-you-put-on-your-site. A recent survey(GVU’s 7th WWW User Survey) found that 86.03% of the users surveyed use the Web to “gather information”. If you don’t have the information or if the information is out-dated no one will visit you twice.

Navigability

With all of this wonderful content there must be some kind of organization. A clear, easy to follow, navigation is a blessing. Visitors are frustrated when they get to a site that should have the information they are looking for but they can’t find it. If a visitor arrives on an internal page of your site you can encourage them to view it from the top by making the front page easily accessible.

Aesthetics

This is the “make-it-pretty” part. It also encompasses the “make-it-fast” part. Eighty-six percent(GVU) of the people visiting your web site are there for the information, not for the pretty pictures. If your graphics and other adornments slow your site down to a crawl your visitors will become frustrated, leave and not come back. If, on the other hand, your graphics are speedy and compliment your subject matter your visitors will thank you.

Here it is, 7 years later and this is still true.
Content -is- king. A stale website is only usable once. Repeat visitors come with often updated and relevant content.
Navigability is still important.. but funneling your users though your front door is so 2001. Because of search engines you have to expect your users to arrive anywhere on your site. With the advent of RSS feeds and readers you have to expect that some of your readers aren’t even visiting your site. When they do come to your site you better tell them who you are and why they should be there. If you read somewhere “Karakaota is SO cool.. it’s totally revolutionized they way I work day-to-day” and you go to http://karakaota.com and spend 15 minutes trying to figure out what it is and why you need it… chances are pretty good that Karakaota is losing at least one customer for every one they keep.
Aesthetics seem to be coming full circle. We’ve been through the “animate everything” phase and the “stop them with a big animated graphic on the front door” phase and finally circled back to simplicity. With a choice between a fully graphic site and a simple site… I’ll choose the simple site. Simplicity is the call words of today. Even though we have broadband and T1 lines running 24/7 a speedy site is still a blessing. Make it pretty.. if you can.. but -always- make it fast.

Blogging technology is a piece of cake. TypePad powers my blog, and this product is very well done.
…
The only two things that I can’t find are:
* An automatically-generated table of contents. “Recent posts” only puts up the last ten posts. I need something that will go back to the very beginning.
* I want to do a “Dear Abby” column in which people post questions, and I answer. These can’t be comments tied to a specific post because they would get buried. I’d like to create an archive of questions and answers that people can search. I looked at a couple of Wiki products, but I didn’t have the mental energy to adapt them to my needs.

I think I know the answer to the first thing.

Assuming that typepad.com has the same templating system as Movable type, setting up a Simple Table of Contents is dead easy.
In the “templates” section, copy the “Main Index” template to a new template. I called this “Table of Contents – Simple” and had it generate the file “simple_toc.html”. Remove everything from the content section of the template and replace it with the following code:

<MTEntries lastn="100000" >
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
</MTEntries>

Save the template. Add a link to this new page from your index. Example: simple_toc.html” (yes, I’ve only been blogging in this blog for a short while. Give me a break).
This will show the last 100,000 entries. If you have more entries you can either increase the value of lastn or, if you’re the only author on your blog, you can change it to author=”{your login name}”. If there’s only one author then that’s a more scalable solution.
It’s not terribly difficult to build a more complex table of content that’s organized by category. Example: complex_toc.html
Do the same procedure as above only use this code:

<MTTopLevelCategories>
<MTSubCatIsFirst><ul class="module-list"></MTSubCatIsFirst>
<MTIfNonZero tag="MTCategoryCount">
<h2><MTCategoryLabel></h2>
<ul>
<MTEntries lastn="10000">
<li><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br /></li>
</MTEntries>
</ul>
</MTIfNonZero>
<MTSubCatsRecurse>
<MTSubCatIsLast></MTSubCatIsLast>
</MTTopLevelCategories>

It would probably be fairly easy to marry this type of table of contents with the primary category/heirachial categorization hack I discussed on my house blog (Yes, an Utterly-off-topic post about blogging software on my house blog is the reason I decided to start “Geeked”.). I’d do an example of it here.. but “Geeked” doesn’t have enough posts for the example to make sense. Maybe later.

I want an online Calendar.
Currently I use a paper calendar and the calendar in Outlook. I don’t print my outlook calendar. I just use it for the reminders and for inviting people to my meetings. It’s a work thing. Work standardized on Outlook so who am I to argue?
The paper calendar is convenient because I can take it into all of my meetings.. When someone says something is “launching on May 7″ I can flip through the calendar and remind them that May 7 is a Sunday. I can add notes about what happened that day “new section launched on {some site} at 9:30 am” so that later on when someone asks why the traffic patterns changed, I’ll have a note to trigger the memory.
I don’t see either one of these calendars going away but I have additional, personal, calendaring needs. There are tons of calendaring sites. I want to do a comparison of these to see how they fit my needs. First I have to define my perfect online calendar.

Features I want in an online calendar:
- Ability to import events (I dont’ want to maintain the event list especially if it’s already published as an iCal feed on a web site)
- Ability to decline events imported from the iCal feed. Just because the imported calendar has an event on it, doesn’t mean I’m going to that event. When I look at the calendar I want to instantly know which events I’m going to. Further when my family looks at the calendar I want them to know which events we’re going to. Ideally, refused events would be greyed out but still show on the calendar (just in case I change my mind and decide to attend).
- Ability to annotate events imported from the iCal feed. I want to be able to add my own notes. This will probably be reminders to myself about that event.
- If an event has a duration over several days and I set a reminder for the event, the reminder should only fire on the first day of the event (this bugs the shit out of me on Yahoo’s calendar).
- Ability to have reminders arrive as email or YIM.
- Ability to share calendar
- Ability to publish calendar on my blog
- Ability to add events to the calendar in an english fashion. I want to add “Meeting with Bob on 4/16/2006 @ 4:30″ not have to fidget with 100 different drop downs on some insertion dialog.
- Ability to add recurring meetings. Especially recurring every-other week (payday).
- Ability to associate picture with event (ok, so it’s a nice to have.. but I get all warm and fuzzy when I see a big pastel easter egg in the calendar for Easter)
- Ability to forward Outlook email invitations to the calendar and have them show up if I accept.
Sites to review:

1. 30boxes : online calendar
2. AirSet : calendars, contacts, lists, blogs, weblinks sharing
3. CalendarHub : online calendar
4. eventful : social calendar sharing
5. Eventicus : social events manager; german
6. EventSniper : online calendar
7. evnt : social calendar sharing
8. GlideDigital : social photo/music/video/file/etc sharing
9. Google Calendar
10. goowy : web-based mail, contacts, calendar, games etc
11. HipCal : online calendar, todo list
12. Hula : open source calendar and mail server
13. Joyent : web-based software
14. Kiko : online calendar
15. Planzo : online calendar sharing
16. Renkoo: Not yet launched.
17. Spongecell : online calendar
18. Tilika : online calendar
19. Trumba : online calendar sharing
20. Upcoming : social events calendar
21. Zvents

More to come…