I was thinking along the line of calendars and events and such, among others after the talk of Frank Mantek about the Google Data API on XTECH and I had the idea:
Why don’t we save and share historical data using Google Calendar and the GData API?
You could create a Google Calendar called ‘History’ and just put in historical events in it. Calendars can also be shared, so other people could subscribe to your history and get your historical event stream. Or you could make specific Calendar for a part of history, say Dutch history or history of the VOC.
Snag So I ran into a snag when I tried to enter the discovery of America (October 12, 1492) in my calendar. Google Calendar does not accept year values smaller than 1901.
I have no idea why. GregorianCalendar (which most Java applications use for their date handling) is proleptic, which means it should be good for any year you can think of.
Workaround The alternative is to get your historical data and input it into the current year. Wikipedia’s date pages seem to be a good candidate for this eg. the page for October 12th lists all events, holidays, births and deaths on that day.
Those pages can be crawled and inserted wholesale into my Google Calendar using its API. For each item you could create one event in the year 2006 and set it to repeat yearly.
Voilà, complete historical birthday calendars for your iCal inclusion (as soon as I get around to writing the script).
That’s a lot of event data. How are we going to browse that? I think we need different ways of representing calendars than we are doing right now. I’ll blog some more about one such way (probably) later this week.
