Prototype Usecase: linking time information in blog entries

For starting things its always good to have one simple but useful usecase to hang in. This forces yourself to look from the users point of view instead of getting lost into technical geek experimentation (i always like those discussions btw..)..

So here it is:
Link time related information in blog entries

1. You write a blog entry and mention a certain date/time you are doing something, attending an event. Possibly your graduation party, your birthday party, your favourite music band gig whatever.. most important: you have something linked to a decent point in time.
2. You open a second tab, browse to worldcalendarproject.com
   
3. You will be immediately confronted with four input fields: your email, your blog entry url, a time /date selection and a field for tagging (like you tag your pictures at Flickr for example)
4. After submitting you'll recieve an email with some information, for now most important: with html fragment prviding a sexy nice symbol linked to your context-page at worldcalendar.com.
   You can drop this fragment next to your time/date related text passage.

Here is what you get from this point:

• your blogentry is now mentioned on worldcalendar.com; the "google" for time/date related informations.
  
• If you tag your city for example, people may catch your entry while looking for events in your city on a certain date/time.
• You don't need to register, because the email you recieve is your key to your entries made with this email.
• You always find your entries just hitting the personal calendar link in your email (remember: this is your key)
• Of cause, sharing calendars from buddies and team mates is not far away from here
• Most important: blog entries (and news entries in general) are now linked and arranged on a single worldwide timeline

Please comment if you have oppinions, contributions or/and hints for this whole idea.
I will followup this blog entry with more about the technical progress, implementation details.

If you have a good name for the whole thing, please tell me about it! I am still looking for a good one. (worldcalendar is.. yeahh.. not sexy)

cheers,
Toni

The Project

This blog is about a missing piece in the web 2.0 universe and a project to fix that.

I am Toni Menzel, a 24-year-old software developer living, working and studying in hannover, germany.

Looking at recent web 2.0 solutions fixing nearly any personal attitude and circumstance: flickr.com to share photos, google to search for any web piece, youtube.com to share videos, del.icio.us to share links and so on.

So you can share everything digital, you can express anything using blogs and wikis.. but in my opinion there is one missing piece: TIME!

Its something pretty usual, its there even before human beings entered the world. At least until now its not possible to travel backwards in time so its a pretty continous and in my opinion linear.

Basically i am thinking of the single calendar on the web, free as google (from the user perspective). Anyone can enter a single event just like in any ordinary personal calendar.
The clue will be that i want to mix up this data (which are basically either a point-in-time or a time-span with locked start and end) with any possible web resource like locations (Google Maps), Ticket Sellers (for music events e.g.), ebay deadlines and even personal things like birthday, weddings and appointments.
Basically, any stored event is open to anyone, even personal things but those are 1st readonly and 2nd without relation to the owner. So just the owner itself (and maybe its buddies) get those privacy sensitive information.
But this is pretty much going into detail, I just want to explain the initial ideas.

This effort is pretty still in its "baby stage" must should grow fast because it's the missing piece in this overcrowded worldwideweb..
So.. to be honest:

i am still looking for more evangelists, developers and supporters (need server!!!)

I will write on this blog as things happen!
Stay tuned & enjoy!

ps.: you can send me email at: tonimenzel (at) gmx.de