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Spamming, I mean Marketing with Google's public CL2 calendars

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Now first for my disclaimer... this really isn't on my list of things to do. Honestly. But I am surprised that this one has not already been jumped all over already by spammers and other "industrious" people. Personally I am trying to think of my own application of these public calendars for business marketing.

You see, Google CL2 calendar has great sharing features built right into the service. You can share one of your calendars with a selected person or the entire world. And on the flip side someone else can share their calendar with you. Clean a simple. Just click "manage calendars" and then "add calendar" and you can now search for whatever you want.

Go ahead, try a few terms out for a test drive.

    23 calendars available for "dallas cowboys"
    9 available for "republican"
    62 for "technology conference" (techies love their Google)

But these are trust built calendars, as I don't really now who created them so I trust that the events are the ones I want. But what if they aren't? Optimizing a spam page to rank top 10 out of 1,000s is tricky but not impossible. How difficult will it be if there are less then 20?

But lets take it from another view... what if I want to get spam type material?. Go ahead and try it... maybe you already did, but try something like porn or sex or viagra. No one is looking over your shoulder so its safe, but then again no one appears to be looking for that calendar either because they aren't out there. Now I don't own a porn/drug related site but surely this would be something I would do if I did. And then my bigger question, what happens to regular calendar searches if the spammers have already seeded the lists?

On the positive side I believe that businesses should really think about ways they can benefit from these public calendars. Do you sell sports items? Then have a Dallas Cowboys calendar and try to be discrete about your plugs. Technology companies should think about listing conferences or venues. And I plan to suggest to my brother to share a calendar to events he plans to photograph.

Just my 2 cents so I guess I will catch you later... I need to go share a calendar.


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