Watching the reports of Gnomedex, I heard about a demonstration of extended RSS processing that the Microsoft IE team did regarding a calendar. Dare Obasanjo explains:

Dean then started to talk about the power of the enclosure element in RSS 2.0. What is great about it is that it enables one to syndicate all sorts of digital content. One can syndicate video, music, calendar events, contacts, photos and so on using RSS due to the flexibility of enclosures.

Amar then showed a demo using Outlook 2003 and an RSS feed of the Gnomedex schedule he had created. The RSS feed had an item for each event on the schedule and each item had an iCalendar file as an enclosure. Amar had written a 200 line C# program that subscribed to this feed then inserted the events into his Outlook calendar so he could overlay his personal schedule with the Gnomedex schedule. The point of this demo was to show that RSS isn’t just for aggregators subscribing to blogs and news sites.

Now, being able to subscribe to an event calendar is very handy, but there is a much simpler way – using hCalendar and Brian Suda’s x2v calendar parsing tool.
I adapted the conference calendar page, to add an “hevent” to each session ( with help from Ryan and his hCalendar creator).

Now you can subscribe to it directly using the x2v link. This is available today, not in a future release of IE, and you can easily add events to your blog or webpage this way for people to subscribe to.
Tags: gnomedex, hCalendar, microformat