Two or three months ago, Roo introduced me to Upcoming.org. We were arranging a lunch for bloggers from Hursley, and he posted the details on the site and posted the link to the event on his internal blog. Since then I’ve barely used it, although he has said “you’ll love it” several times… I just never got around to looking at it properly. As with so many other sites, I created a basic profile and never went back for more.
When Flickr launched its most recent batch of upgrades, I noticed that certain photos now have a “Taken at an Upcoming.org event” logo. It turns out that Upcoming was bought by Yahoo!, and now the sites are becoming more integrated.
The way it works is pretty simple. You create a profile. You find events, and then either say that you are going to watch them, or attend them. The site keeps an RSS feed of your events for you. You can also grab your list of events in iCal format.
You can sign up to monitor “metros” i.e. locations (so in my case, I might be interested in stuff going on in Guildford, or London, so I subscribe to the feeds for those metros to see what is going to be happening).
Events themselves are listed by date, type, location, etc.. The thing that I think put me off, originally, was the fact that there were so few events listed for some metros I was interested in. Yesterday I wanted to remind myself that there’s a photography exhbition that I’m interested in at the Barbican, but the event was not listed… so I created the entry. Now there’s someone else interested. I just need to remember that I shouldn’t always wait for someone else to create an event, and instead, get involved and create the listing myself.
Being Web 2.0 and social network-oriented, you can of course add friends and see what they are interested in, too. It could be a good way of finding out some of the cooler events that you might otherwise have missed. I’ll try to get into this more… for now, I’ve added a box with the feed of the events I’m interested in to my blog sidebar, in case you want to know what I’m planning to do.
Yup, looks like it is “Roo Reynolds Day” on The lost outpost… 🙂
