This 27 September 2010 episode of the Technometria podcast features Jon Udell speaking with host Phil Windley and Scott Lemon about Udell’s elmcity project. For the past several years. Udell has been working to encourage people to think about ways they can ensure that calendar events could be published online in ways that make syndication possible. This project he launched makes it easy for people to curate a calendar of local events that can easily be syndicated and repurposed elsewhere (e.g., published on other web sites automatically and available to be incorporated into people’s own personal calendars in Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, etc.)

One interesting aspect of the pub/sub model that I hadn’t thought of before is that if I publish content with feeds (blog posts, bookmarks, calendar events, tweets, etc.), the idea of people subscribing to my feed and viewing my content in a personal aggregator is only part of the picture; the easiest model to envision is the feed readers people use to subscribe to my blog posts. Udell, though, wants the idea of subscription to a feed to also include subscription by machines, as in the case of a calendar feed I create being automatically ingested by some service and maybe republished via that service.