A Master Editorial Calendar (for Everything)

May 15, 2007 by ian

Sometimes the best ideas are right in front of you, but someone else has to point 'em out.

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion suggests creating a single online editorial calendar for bloggers. His post focuses on creating any editorial calendar, but he cleverly tagged his posts so that folks can search for and find them in Google Calendar. If everyone used the same tag, there'd be a master editorial calendar for a range of blogs.

Totally brilliant!

The steps:

Create a Google calendar.
Make it public.
Save upcoming blog articles as events, and include '(edcal)' in the title.

Now everyone can search Google Calendars and find your event.

The benefits of a shared editorial calendar range from better community-building to better PR opportunities. It's huge! And simple!

Some suggested ideas to enhance the concept:

Create a Google Calendar mashup that displays who's writing what, when, without requiring users to search (I'm already working on it).
Put your web address into the 'location' field.
Eventually, move to microformats, so that spiders could grab this information on-the-fly.

I'm very excited about this idea. PIck up this thread and run with it, folks!