Are you familiar with Community Megaphone? I ignored it when I was first told about it (sorry about that, Rachel!) because I thought "Uggh, yet another place I have to re-enter my user group meeting info." But I was hanging out with the person who created it, Andrew Duthie, and he took a few minutes to show me around and I realize my initial reaction was very short-sighted.

Currently, I do the following to promote the Vermont.NET User Group meetings:

1. Add the meeting to the VTdotNET website. I have a web data entry form that I use to get the info into the database. This works very nicely for me. I'm the only person who has access to this page and my database has a table of locations and a table of speakers as well as a table for events, so it's not a lot of work for me to create or edit an event.


2. Manually update the home page of the user group website. While the database feeds to the website's "future" and "past" meetings pages, I like to manually control the home page.


3. If I remember and if it is not too late, email the information in a form to MSDN for their newsletter. I rarely remember and when I do, it's usually too late.


4. If I remember and if it is not too late, log into the CodeZone website and enter the meeting info into their system. I rarely remember and I always wonder if anyone who needs this info sees it because the website requres users to have an account. Only logged-in members will discover the meeting info.


5. Send emails to the user group's email list


6. Blog it on my other blog

So, as you can see, this is a lot of effort.

Community Megaphone goes a long way to simplify my life as a user group leader and as someone who is interested in keeping up with area events.

It gives me a central place to put the meeting announcements where that information is easily discovered.

Here are the features that stand out in my memory.

• Information is publically available.
• Anyone can create a highly customizable RSS feed to get alerts of meetings that meet their interests.
• Automatically configure that RSS feed into HTML that you can drop into your website or blog.
• Tight integration with Live Maps so that you can not only see where the meeting is, but easily get directions.
• Other Microsoft Developer Evangelists are starting to use it as a resource for compiling the MSDN Blast about upcoming events. That takes care of #3 and that blast goes out to a wide audience.

I dream of future integration with sites like CodeZone and INETA.

Andrew has done an amazing job creating this site. He originally did it as a learning exercise for himself and since there was no outside pressure, he was able to take the time and keep adding features to it that made the tool more useful for him personally. In doing that, it became something that is now useful for a lot of people.

So if you have a Microsoft technology related meeting to promote or if you want to keep informed about gatherings in your region, definitely take advantage of this resource. I certainly plan to.