At least, in theory, that's what happens. In practice, even though the iCalendar specification dates back to 1998, calendar clients still struggle to implement it correctly. Here's where I think structured blogging, which provides data-entry forms to gather instances of microformatted data and display templates to render them, can play a role.

Publishing events via RSS could be useful in a couple of ways. We want to be notified about upcoming events, and RSS is all about notification. We also want to combine events from different sources, and search across them. RSS isn't pixie dust, and it won't make incompatible microformats and applications work together -- not by itself, anyway. But intermediaries enabled by RSS just might.

Today, enterprise intermediaries operating in the SOA realm help us unify disparate messaging and authentication systems. A new breed of intermediaries operating in the RSS realm could help us unify our many work, home, and other calendars.