R|mail and OPML  

Is there something I'm not grasping, or are a lot of people still seeing OPML only within a blogroll (or reading list) context? For instance, see this page of my "All the cars we've ever owned" outline at R|mail.

The subscription options and the display seem to stress the separateness of the constituent feeds, rather than the community outline as a whole.

Maybe the world outline concept isn't well enough understood yet, or it just hasn't gotten much attention compared to other potential uses of OPML? I guess you have to conquer the world one continent at a time.

Shared outlines 

Another possibility: people get the idea of an outline having several contributors, but they don't see how they might put it to use. I thought of a good application last week. I don't think I blogged about here yet. Company or organization phone directories.

My employer just recently stopped handing out the 14-page front-and-back stapled-together printed phonebook that lists extensions by employee last name and cross references by department. Now employees grab it from an Outlook public folder (a more universally accessible place for remote locations than our file servers) and print it if they need to.

But! Somebody still goes to the trouble once a month of collecting info from all the departments and editing the directory in Word. If a delegate from each department was responsible for changes, the thing could be fluid, always up to date.

If any developers have plans to make a special-purpose intranet version of the community server, I think a phone directory would be a great module to consider.

Hey... speaking of Outlook public folders 

How could Microsoft allow viewing of an OPML outline in a public folder? Maybe it wouldn't have to be a new file type. Just put the onus on the author to render it in HTML? Or maybe they're cooking up something else in Outlook for RSS integration that could be bent to suit.