As an information professional, it's not that often you come across a tool that is both (a) extremely easy to use and (b) can create a whole range of simple, effective and ultimately indispensable new services for your users.

If that tool also allows you to start experimenting with the potential of RSS in developing new products and services for your customers, then you should be on to a winner.

RSSCalendar is, according to the blurb:

"...an exciting new way for individuals and organizations to share their calendars with family, friends, and co-workers - utilizing the latest in "Really Simple Syndication" (RSS) technology, including RSS channel creation and aggregation. Not only is RSSCalendar easy to use but it is also easy to administer, and setup is a snap. RSSCalendar is well-suited for a variety of uses, including:

• Individual calendars


• Family calendars


• Company calendars


• School calendars


• Organization calendars


• Team calendars


• City calendars"

This free, web hosted application is indeed extremely easy to set up and once you've posted some content into your calendar, it's just a click away from creating real-time RSS feeds that users can subscribe to in their newsreaders and aggregators. You simply provide them with the auto-generated RSS link for each calendar you think they'll be interested in and they paste that into their newsreader or aggregator's feed subscriber.

As you add new, or amend existing events in the calendar(s), your subscribers get notified, in real-time.

The real beauty of this tool lies in the subscriber's abillity to import the RSS-fed calendar content from their aggregator into their desktop calendaring application.

Another click or so, and all the events can be imported into the likes of MS Outlook. Or saved as a vCal file and emailed to someone else.

As an information professional, here are just a few ideas as to the types of RSSCalendars you could create for your users:

• forthcoming Trade Shows, Exhibitions and Conferences that may be of interest to your users


• upcoming Company Earnings Results, Dividend Announcements, AGMs


• upcoming government publication of Economic Indicators

RSSCalendar offers a quick and easy way to learn how to create valuable services from RSS feeds. Recommended.

Related articles:

• RSSCalendar
  Catalogablog
• RSSCalendar
  Nick Bradbury