If you find yourself responsible for planning a public event, you'll want to use every possible means to get the word out, right? Short of hiring a town crier, how do you spread the word? After submitting notice to the regular list of places, the newspapers, newsletters, and paper fliers on bulletin boards, is there any other place to turn?

In the electronic world, there is an increasing number of places to announce your events. Since the early days of the Internet, there has been USENET newsgroups with groups focused on events or general topics of discussion. Locally there are kw.events and kw.general for Kitchener-Waterloo (although it looks like kw.events has been quiet for some time). There are also groups at the province level named ont.events and ont.general. One of the easiest ways to read and "post" (or submit) a message on USENET is to use Google Groups at http://groups-beta.google.com/ which has a fairly simple interface. Newsgroup software for dealing with newsgroups used to be commonplace on personal computers, but these days is not so popular. While likely not growing in numbers, people that read newsgroups are no doubt loyal in their reading habits, so you might be able to inform some members of the community with this method.

Another on-line option for announcing your event is the Upcoming.org website which is growing in popularity. Once you sign up for an account here, you can post and categorize a message about your event, and anyone will be able to see it (whether they have an account or not). Once nice feature about Upcoming.org, is that it you can subscribe to a web feed of events for a geographic area. A web feed allows you to use reader software to keep track of several different feeds at once. If you read several blogs for instance, your reader software should also be able to handle the web feed from this site and for your area of interest. Each time a new event is added, all subscribers would get the message next time they opened their reader.

If you are organizing an event for a select few people as opposed to an open invitation event, you might not need or want to broadcast your message to the entire Internet. For cases like this, you could setup and share the event using the new Google Calendar service at http://calendar.google.com/. Google calendar lets you setup any number of calendars with different levels of permissions on who can see or change the calendars. For instance, you could setup a public calendar for anyone to see, or one that only people you invite are allowed to look at. In combination with Google Groups (on-line discussion groups), you could have your organization's members coordinated in no time. Of course, Yahoo! also offers similar features with their groups website at http://groups.yahoo.com/ where each group has a calendar available to them.

If USENET groups and websites seem to be too broad of a net to cast, and you don't have a defined list of people that you can notify through a Google or Yahoo! group, then you might want to find some middle ground. Do a bit of research, and try to find sites on the Internet that cater to people interested in what your event is all about. For instance, if you wanted to hold a swap meet for hobby robotics enthusiast, you might want to look for on-line discussion groups where people interested in robotics might "hang out" on-line. Provided that the terms of use are not violated, you should be able to post a notice there.

If you are really stuck for ways to announce your event, don't be afraid to ask a blogger that covers your interests. Some people's blogs have a large and loyal readership which could help "generate a buzz" around your event if they are willing to help you out. With this "word of mouth" method, you will have to be sure that your event goes well, because the blogoshpere is just as fast (or maybe even faster) at spreading bad news as it is at spreading the news of your event.