Folksonomy is a term you are hearing more about each day, with Web sites such as Flickr.com showing how content can be organized via user-written taxonomies. On Flickr, users upload their personal photos and “tag” them with categories or keywords that aid other users in finding your pictures, which they can comment on, link to, or reuse—if you want them to.
Which brings us to Upcoming.org. This site, according to its creators, is a “social event calendar, completely driven by people like you.” Although it is billed as a way to manage personal events that can be shared with others, we like to use it for finding conferences and other events in our field of expertise.
Why is it so difficult to find a manageable list of conferences on the Web? More often than not, such lists are either too specialized or too voluminous. By contrast, Upcoming.org seems to always offer an event or two we hadn't heard of but wish we had. And users can comment on past conferences they have attended. Events are found by searching on keywords. You can also browse conferences by selecting tags such as opensource or software.
As an added bonus, should you decide to register with the site, it can track the events you show an interest in and suggest events you might not have considered.