Posts tagged events

I’ve been looking for a calendar feature in-world that would allow me to keep track of upcoming events that I’d like to attend; I need a way to mark the events of interest as I encounter them. As I searched, I came across a couple of in-world tools: one wasn’t developed well enough and was hard to use and the other was 800L to purchase. However, I stumbled across an article in the Second Life Knowledge Base that is very useful: all events scheduled in Second Life are automatically ported/sync’ed with the online calendaring system at Eventful (www.eventful.com). Gauging from the number of user-generated calendars and groups, it doesn’t appear as though many users are taking advantage of the service even though it allows users to mark or export SL events to del.icio.us, digg, Yahoo calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, Rabble or iCal!!

I believe this is a tremendous collaborative, networking tool for real life educators in Second Life, and with hope that it will be a useful and well-used tool, I have created a Group Calendar called Real Life Education Events in Second Life. This calendar is designed to include (a) openings of new sims by educational institutions, (b) educational conferences or meetings held in-world, (c) publicly available course lectures, or (d) discussions or meetings focused on the use of Second Life to facilitate Real Life education. If you search Eventful for SL calendars or groups, please pay particular attention to the word Events in the title of the group I’ve created; there are a couple of similarly titled groups/calendars that are false starts I had with the service. Group members can collaboratively add events to the calendar; anyone is welcome to join the group.

Adding events to the group calendar is quite simple. Since all SL events are added to Eventful, it’s possible to browse the list of ALL in-world events categorized as Learning, Education. Clicking on an event relevant to Real Life Education – as the image posted with this blog entry shows – allows users to (1) link directly to the in-world location of the event via a slurl, (2) add the event to a calendar including: eventful, Google, Yahoo, Outlook, Rabble or iCal, and (3) indicate they are watching and/or going to the event.

Even better, each group calendar also has an RSS feed; enabling user subscriptions via news readers/rss aggregators. If you’d like to subscribe to the Real Life Education Events in Second Life, the RSS feed is available at http://eventful.com/rss/groups/G0-001-003671779-1. You can also add the calendar to your own web page, and you’ll see the feed from the Group Calendar in the right hand column of this blog.