A quick tip for iPhone wielders, because I’m finding this pretty handy.  If you’re like me, there are various different places where events you might want to attend are stored. You’ve got your own calendar on the phone, which is probably the one that reminds you what you’re actually planning to do day to day.  But there’s also whatever you’ve been invited to via Facebook. Maybe there are specific sorts of events you track on Upcoming or Eventful. Instead of scanning lots of individual venue calendars, I like to use SonicLiving to keep tabs on all the local shows being played by the artists I’m listening to on Last.FM or Pandora.

Naturally, this can all get fairly unwieldy. But here’s a neat way to keep it all sorted. With most of the services mentioned above, there’s native support for some kind of feed that can be used to subscribe to the relevant calendar in Google Calendars. Facebook doesn’t support this natively, but you can autogenerate a feed of events you’ve been invited to using the FBCal app. Once you’ve got your subscription list set up, you can just log in to that service once a week or so and quickly scan through what’s coming up in whatever category you’re interested in. And then with another click or two, you can copy the ones you’re interested in, with all the relevant details, to your personal calendar.

Once that’s set up, there’s a free service called NuevaSync that will automatically push your calendar to your iPhone over the air. And then you’re set.  For a modicum of initial time investment, you’ve got a one stop shop for reviewing the events you might want to attend, and it’s all painlessly beamed to your phone calendar, which saves you the trouble of entering the details by hand. Moreover, if you’ve got a shared calendar with some of your friends, say, the additions they make can get pushed to the phone automatically as well. All of which is incredibly useful if you find yourself saying “Oh, crap, that was today?” as often as I do.