Notifications are now working. This means if in your Smart Calendars you've indicated you want to be notified whenever a matching event gets added, updated, or withdrawn from the system, you'll get an email!
Here's how it works.
First, you need to sign in (or register as a new user). Then, from the home page, create a smart calendar.
For example purposes, let's say you want to create a smart calendar that tracks any public events that Guy Kawasaki is participating in. You would click on the little "+" box next to the word "Smart Calendars", to add a new smart calendar. In this example, we'll call it "kawasaki-watch".
Once you've created the smart calendar, you can add some settings such as some conditions to indicate you want to track events that contain the term "kawasaki".
The resulting Smart Calendar will look something like this:
To turn on notifications for this Smart Calendar, you'd want to go to this Smart Calendar's settings page (by clicking the Settings box at the top) and then down at the bottom of the settings page, click the "Send me an email" checkbox followed by one of the three radio buttons to indicate how often you'd like to receive emails (should there be something new for the system to alert you about). See the illustration below:
In this example, as more events flow into EVDB that have to do somehow with Guy Kawasaki, you'll start receiving email updates automatically! For instance, here's what an email might look like:
You can always change the frequency of the emails (hourly only makes sense if you absolutely positively Need To Know when stuff gets updated quickly) or disable the notification altogether by un-checking the "Send me an email" checkbox on the Settings page.
Some things that still need to be done with Smart Calendars
We're not done with Smart Calendars. For one thing, it's hard to pin down the location or geographical area of events you might be interested in. We're aware of this and are working to improve what kinds of settings and conditions you can specify so that Smart Calendars work even, well, smarter! :-)
We hope you'll give Smart Calendar notifications a try and we hope you find events you might otherwise have missed! Be sure to let us know what you think and how we can make Smart Calendars better.
