Microsoft and Eventful announced on Sept 28th the arrival of the
Event Plugin, a software plugin for Microsoft's
Windows Live Writer blogging tool.
The best introduction to Microsoft's Windows Live Writer and the Event Plugin powered by Eventful is available here as a half-hour "screencast" with Jon Udell of Infoworld interviewing Microsoft's JJ Allaire and Jack Ozzie (complete with ping-pong like stereo audio, with Udell in one ear, and the Microsoft folks in the other). It's episode 9 of Screening Room, what Jon Udell calls a "monthly series of screencasts about important software." Elsewhere Udell has this to say about why watching the screencast is worthwhile: "Live Writer itself may or may not appeal to you as a blog authoring tool, but if you're curious about how Ray Ozzie's wiring the web strategy will play out, you'll want to see and think about the end-to-end linkup between Live Writer and Eventful that's shown here."
Inserting events into your blog posts just got a lot easier!
The Event Plugin lets you create your own events or find existing events through integrated search of the Eventful.com website. Format the event, add a picture, edit the description, customize what data is displayed. The published post includes correct hCalendar microformatting. The plugin also enables pastes of copied events via Live Clipboard from the Eventful.com website.
When you click on the Insert Event button within Windows Live Writer (with the Event Plugin installed), you invoke the Event Plugin, and it displays a dialog box that looks like this:
You can fill out the form and post an event listing (with all the appropriate hCalendar microformatting in place) right in your blog, or, even cooler, you can search Eventful to find events:
Note how you can even sign in to your Eventful account.
Let's say you search for "MIT" in "Cambridge, MA", and Eventful comes back with these results:
You can then select a result, click OK, and it gets inserted into the form we saw before:
You can even search calendars on Eventful, and find events that way:
Bottom line, if you use Windows, and you blog, you ought to try out Windows Live Writer -- with the new Events Plugin!
Let us know what you think, and what features you'd like to see added to it!
