An iCal file for Blog Posts
Posted on April 13th, 2006
Say, that iCal program that Apple bundles with OS X is awfully nice. As is the newly released Google Calendar. How come nobody puts out iCal files for their blog entries? That could be a handy way of evaluating a new site rather than just knee-jerk subscribing to their RSS feed.
A calendar could show patterns of activity better than a dated list of titles. Maybe that interesting article that brought you to a site in the first place was just a fluke; or maybe it's part of a larger block of posts that--at least from their titles-- seem as exciting as sawdust.
Calendars can tell you what's coming up too. If I subscribe to someone's iCal file and see there's an upcoming series of posts on a subject I'm interested in, having a reminder in the calendar is a more natural place than an email inbox or aggregator, each of which managed by a separate application and separate portion of attention.
It looks like Kevin Hemenway talked about this idea a bit in 2002 (also: at disobey.com). Don't see much else in the historical record.
I suppose it would be prudent to consider things like microformats and structured blogging. Both seem more elaborate than linking to some sort of iCal file. It would be a lot easier to say, "Here's an iCal file if you're into that sort of thing!" versus, "Hey! I publish iCal compatible metadata! Go find some application or service that will know how to make heads or tails of it today!"