Dave Winer's OPML roadshow, live from Bezerkley 

Note: I ended up writing a whole essay on my thoughts about Dave's OPML roadshow after the roadshow, which I posted at http://www.thebishop.net/geodog/archives/2005/08/21/dave_winers_opml_roadshow_comes_to_the_berkeley_cybersalon.html. What follows are the notes I took during his presentation, using Dave's OPML editor.

Dave just did Hello World

Dave introduces Dave Wilkenson next to me, then points at some link to my opml blog. How did he find that? Ah, http://changes.opml.org ;

Dave introduces one of the authors of the sims in the audience, didn't catch the name.

Q from the audience: Is OPML the same as Radio?

Yes and no. All the software you see today is GPL. It was in Radio. Dave "I don't want the job of the programmer any more" I want to create communities of developers

Dave says "OPML is a dialect of XML, like RSS" No giant groans from the audiences, so clearly the semantic web crowd isn't here.

Dave "I'm the only place where people can host this stuff now, I'm trying to get out of that business as fast as possible."

People will look at cloning part of this to PHP, Perl, ASP, but Dave suggests that people would be better off porting the whole framework to Linux.

Now Dave does the stuff that makes him so "loved" in the community -- people ask him to make the fonts bigger so people can read the screen -- he complains and and says deal with it.

Dave then relents and makes his fonts bigger. He gripes, but he does it. He has changed.

Dave then shows off a cool feature of his OPML editor -- it is also an RSS aggregator (like Radio).

Quote of the day (not exact) "OPML is not far behind RSS in terms of adoption" But it didn't have the wars of RSS.

Dave introduces Tom Abate from the Chronicle

Dave is enjoying dropping names, next one is Ray Ozzie, formerly of Groove, now CTO of Microsoft (great news for Microsoft, bad news for the rest of us). Wonder why he is here?

A question about broken links that I meant to be very specific turned into a philosophical question, then back to specific. A very funny moment that I'm not good at live blogging because I was in the middle of it.

Dave is mellower than he used to be (so far).

Now he shows subscribing to other outlines, which is one of the very cool features of his OPML editor. People can colloborate on a story, can join stuff on the fly. Tom Abate of the Chronicle is very exited about it. Very Excited.

Introduces Buzz Bruggman of Active Words in the audience.

Dave says that his subscribe feature of his outliner, described above, is how directories should work. Dave shows directories from CNBC? and podcast directories. Shows delegation of parts of directories.

Now introduces Scoble (I can't believe that I am actually beating Scoble on getting a post out), and Andy from the Entourage team at Microsoft. 

Shows the cool feature for geeks that if click on XML icon in hosted OPML icon, can see where directory is stored.

Dave actually said that blogs work and email "has problems". He has mellowed.

Any tool that generates OPML can create an OPML file and stick in the www directory can use Dave's system

Sylvia "What's your business model"

Dave, "I don't have one, doh".

Dave "I just think that this is what the internet should do. I'm lucky, I've had some successes, RSS, people will listen to me, so I can effect the internet. I have plenty of money, I don't wake up trying to figure out how to make more money."

Good discussion of OPML vs RSS with Steve Gillmor in the audience-- RSS good for events, changes, not good for relationships -- OPML good for relationships.

Blogging tools are the majority of what people are using to create HTML, but it could be done more efficiently

Q from the audience, what about tools to make audio and video easier?

Dave "I'm a text guy"

Steve Gillmor "is there an API for this?"

DW: Yes, we have an API for everything. This is the environment that SOAP, Metawebloging API, RSS, XML-RPC were developed in." This is like a database system + a language like python.

Q: how does this connect with Movable Type/Typepad?

DW: It doesn't. It will. I want to have a folder like the www folder now, where you would save stuff that it would send up to Wordpress, MT, etc. I talked briefly with Matt Mullenweg about having one blogging tool that would understand OPML natively. I talked to Mena Trott too, she finish it and we will support it. Discussion with ?? about Active Renderer, which DW says is an awesome tool.

Dave talks about developer culture, and how to make them more user friendly. He highlights Matt Mullenweg as an example. Dave talks about how software development and becoming user friendly is an iterative process. "I only want to make software that everyone can use" Two years ago I thought that college professors were a great a target, but I found that Harvard professors weren't that ambitious. ... Now I think, lets build off of RSS -- how to build networks that will change the world.

Steve Rhodes also started an opml blog while here. 

Phil Wolff askes "Where do you see this a year from now?"

Dave gets a little testy, says why asking me? What about you? What are you doing to do with it over the next year. That's the beauty of GPL. You, Phil help/ You were at Manilapoluza. It was a great event. But then I got sick I can't take the burden.

Q: How does this relate to the Wikipedia?

A: It is orthoganal.

Q: How does your product relate to Radio Userland.

We started from Fronteir, not Radio Userland.... I love the outliner community. We got the users to design the product in the 80's, now we want to try to get the users to produce it. The code is at http://support.opml.org.

OPML is more structured than RSS.

[I hate liveblogging, because you miss stuff, Plus my lack of ability to spell is revealed to the world. But it is fun to try occasionally. ]

People here I know , (will get their blogs later):

Phil Wolff

Bruce Bruggman

Cohen Raines

Scot Rosenberg

Steve Gillmor

Lance Knobel

Scoble.

Sylvia Paull now stops to introduce all the famous people in the audience, which I really hate.It seems like a minor version of celebrity f**king, and designed to seperatate out the hoi polloi from the digerati, but I guess that is what PR folks do.

My cleaned up version of this, with conlusions and impressions, will be at http://www.thebishop.net/geodog/ and maybe The Berkeley Blog. 

Actually ended up writing a whole essay, posted at http://www.thebishop.net/geodog/archives/2005/08/21/dave_winers_opml_roadshow_comes_to_the_berkeley_cybersalon.html

Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 7:18 PM.

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