interdok is not fabulous, but it's ok.http://www.interdok.com/mind... - it looks ugly. there was one for CS that had promise and there was a subscription one from CSA, but I don't know what happened with that. In general,this is a very hard problem, IMHO, even though it shouldn't be - Christina Pikas

http://www.nature.com/naturee... ? - Pierre Lindenbaum

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/ is more about entertainment but maybe there's some utility. - Bill Hooker

Thanks, Christina, Interdok is pretty useful for conferences. Now I'd like to add something that incorporates local meetups and user groups as well. - Mr. Gunn

Nature Events seems pretty good too, for those events big enough to have PR people that publicize them. The hard thing is to find the local smaller stuff. - Mr. Gunn

I've used upcoming, and I think they do some spidering for things that look like events, but they also pick up a lot of science night at the Zoo stuff. I think a combo of these and a tweaked google alert should get me mostly there, though. Thanks everyone! - Mr. Gunn

Twitter search? It seems there's always someone tweeting about events (especially for tech-ier ones), so maybe it's just a matter of finding the right search terms/hashtags. And then parsing webpages for location and date details if not in the message... hmm, maybe not so simple... - Shirley Wu

I've had success with wikiCFP for conferences: http://www.wikicfp.com/ For events, if you have any relevant university departments in your area, subscribe to their event RSS feeds? They often post stuff of interest to their students. - Heather Piwowar

WikiCFP looks OK for IT-related stuff, confabb has no results for San Diego this year :-( - Mr. Gunn

Getting in contact with people in the area who are interested in the same topic is the most effective method. Finding events through automated systems becomes more efficient when they are shared by individuals. - Mike Chelen

http://www.meetup.com - Endre Sebestyen from Alert Thingy