iRadar: Share & Subscribe To Public Calendars Using Zapaday

Friday, August 05, 2011

Share & Subscribe To Public Calendars Using Zapaday

Share & Subscribe To Public Calendars Using Zapaday: "

You’re possibly one of many people who use Google Calendar or some other digital calendar to look after your timetabling needs. You might have your own schedule meticulously planned and co-ordinated. But where do you look when you want to know about public schedules? Are you subscribed to public calendars for things you want to know about, like movie releases and world events? Would you like to be? Or would you like to share information about public events with a wider audience? Would you like to collaborate on or edit a public calendar for the greater good? It’s all possible at Zapaday.

What Zapaday does is collect and co-ordinate public calendaring information. They offer public calendars for all sorts of useful public information, such as dates for international affairs, religious holidays, scientific awards, computer game releases, conferences, music festivals and more. As a user, you can both contribute to these calendars and subscribe to the information they provide.

Why Use Zapaday?

While there are public iCal calendars available in many places online, it’s often difficult to find public calendars of information you’d like to subscribe to. When you do find a calendar, it’s uncertain whether the calendar will continue to be edited and updated. Zapaday removes some of this uncertainty because it is so easy for users to submit events and sub-calendars to existing calendars. With many editors and contributors working on the information in each calendar, you can be more certain about its relevance and accuracy.

Join Zapaday

Zapaday is currently in private Alpha, but anyone can register for the waiting list. The first 50 MakeUseOf users to register using the code “MakeUseOf” will be prioritised in the queue and should be able to use Zapaday very shortly.

Subscribe To Calendars

The calendars are all categorised in such a way that it’s easy to browse for topics that suit your needs. For each calendar, you can subscribe to the iCal feed in Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal or whatever service you normally use to subscribe to calendar feeds.

Subscribe To Events

If you’re not interested in subscribing to whole calendars, Zapaday allows users to mark individual events as interesting. While viewing the event, mark as “Show on My Zapaday” and Zapaday will collect these events for you into a calendar just for you. You can then subscribe to this calendar in your normal calendaring software by going to “My Zapaday” and going through the subscription steps.

Editing Calendars & Collaboration

For content creators, Zapaday makes it easy for people to find your calendars. If you’re creating a public calendar in Zapaday, you’re unlikely to find yourself diligently editing a calendar for people who never view the information.

There are editors for each calendar, usually determined by who originally created the calendar. You may apply to edit any given calendar, or you can submit entries to the calendar for approval. If you prefer, you may wish to create a sub-calendar which you can edit yourself. This is ideal for submitting local events to a broader calendar.

For instance, there’s a calendar for Australian Affairs which currently has sub-calendars for “Australian Parliament Agenda” and for “Australia Prime Minister Agenda“. Another appropriate sub-calendar would perhaps be the “South Australian Parliament Agenda” and so on for other states.

It’s up to you whether you choose to create a new sub-calendar or to submit individual events to calendars. Whichever you choose, it’s easy to get involved with Zapaday and sharing useful information with many people who will use it.