Can we breathe a sigh of relief? 

My friend Hil's husband, Michael Raupach, a climate scientist in Australia, spoke with an amazing amount of restraint and reason in opposition to a controversial TV program that minimizes the dangers of global warming.

I think it's smart how he steps around the arguments you usually hear from Gore followers, that naysayers are in bed with the oil companies. True as it may be it only politicizes the issue and brings out the Ann Coulters who will line up and salute along with their folks. Instead, Michael attributes climate change opposition to people who just can't accept that little old us, humans, could affect changes on a planetary level.

My awe of our part of the solar system dimmed when I was a teenager and realized the moon was only a little more than 200,000 miles away, a distance you could drive if you had a mind to. And a couple years. Boring drive, though. You'd have to stock up on a lot of audio books.

Use of OPML in SpringWidgets (and a more general lament) 

I said I'd test SpringWidgets. Here's my car roll file as a SpringWidget:

Like LooseStitch, the new outline authoring tool I found last week, SpringWidgets will display an OPML file but doesn't support inclusion of other OPML files within it. The included outlines are shown as external links that leave you to your computer's own devices for displaying them.

To be fair, the SpringWidget is meant to be a feed reader, so I should show what it's meant to do -- read an OPML file containing RSS feeds.

Here's my piano player's reading/listening list:

If you click on the individual feeds whose posts have audio enclosures, the file will play in a built-in Flash player. That's nice, but I do think it's a shame that so many of these kinds of applications use only a part of what the OPML format can do.

When I was researching my little PDF book on OPML last year I noticed that a majority of even the savviest web users equate OPML with collecting feeds and moving them around, and that's it. The perception doesn't seem to have changed in the last year. In fact, the narrower definition may have become even more entrenched.

In my ebook I open the first section, on sharing subscription lists, with this:

Serving up a list of RSS feeds is one of the oldest uses of OPML. It continues to be one of the most popular applications. In fact, you may hear people refer to their subscription lists as "their OPML." In a Gillmor Gang podcast recorded on June 6, 2006, you can hear Dana Gardner do just that. He harangues Hugh MacLeod to hand over his OPML so Dana can see why Hugh's opinion of the nature of the blogosphere is so different from his own.

OK I did devote the first six of 14 sections of the humble little treatise to sub lists and reading lists, but there's so much more fun and productivity the format can enable, and I wish people would notice and appreciate more of its uses. I'm talking about distributed directories, instant outlining for collaboration, live blogging and meeting notes, documentation, and probably other applications nobody has thought up yet. If we could rekindle interest in making the community server easy to install and configure on all platforms, a wider range of business applications would be easier to demonstrate.

Also, it's a little ironic that the original application for outlining, just organizing ideas, has become almost eclipsed by all the focus on feeds. I've always been fascinated and puzzled by how Dave's More and ThinkTank outliners could be so hot in the pre-web era, then just disappear completely as a category. People say MS Word's outlining feature wiped out the need, but that's never quite made complete sense to me, especially now with the popularity of "Getting Things Done" and organizing methods.

Sorry, can't help pushing; that's what wild-eyed evangelists, even we softer wistful ones, are compelled to do.

Creep 

bushwack

Later: It was a stalker on Twitter. The account has been removed now. Excellent