Finally someone publishing calendar data

Baby steps, baby steps... both to proper publishing of calendar data and to open data in government/administration.

The municipality of Vienna publishes the calendar of public school holidays for this year as an iCalendar file... (here at
Schulferien in Wien im Schuljahr 2011/2012; German only).

For non-nerds they go so far as to explain what an ICS file is: "for integration with e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Ical or  Google Calendar".

Nice.
Let's hope this is not a one-time, static file for 2011/2011 only, but will become a stream of school holiday data...

Thanks, Martin, for the pointer.

Google Takeout

So I joined Google+ today (thanks, Martin, for the invitation), but more importantly I want to write about Google Takeout today.

Best starting point is the video from the The Data Liberation Front:



The announcement seems a lot more promising than the current implementation itself.
It must have been written exclusively for Google+, becaus that's what Google Takeout focuses on.

There is neither Gmail nor Calendar export... Contacts are exported, though, and conveniently grouped into .vcf files (per contact group... and your circles (see, I told you it was designed for Google+).

Still a good start. Better than Facebook for now. And I like their mindset... that this is MY data, not theirs.