zengun

The most recent labour of love of dr Dave and David House, bCal can be described as a calendar server that aggregates events from blogs.

To add an event to a bCal server, simply make a blog entry about the event, spruce up your markup with some hCalendar microformat, then trackback the bCal server.
Of course, you’re not limited to blogs. Wikis or even static pages (using a third party trackback tool such as Primitive) can be used to add an event.

I was skeptical about the practical uses of microformats, mostly because I saw them from the wrong angle: usage by webcrawlers. bCal is an example of how we can be active with the data rather than passively wait for search engines to make sense (and then use) of it.

So as a way to test bCal, I’ll tell you about next wednesday’s monthly event, ParisCarnet. It’s a bloggers meeting in Paris. Around a beer or twelve, until late, we chat and debate about everything and nothing (but as you can imagine it often does revolve around blogs). Everyone’s welcome (we have had blog readers attending), even if you’re not from Paris or if you don’t speak French.
Now let’s see if bCal catches the trackback and correctly parses this entry’s event…

(Update: after I fixed the mess that WP did with my nested <span> tags, and trackbacked again, bCal parsed and registered the event!)

(Update: dr Dave introduces bCal.)