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Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Thanksgiving is great, I got to watch the Macy's Day parade with my four year old this morning. I have a childlike, irrepressible love for parades, and my son had never seen the giant balloons before. It's on my list of things to do before I die, to see that parade in person. What if OPML was a navigational element for podcasts and videoblogs? I could listen to a year's worth of On The Media in an hour just by listening to the top-level elements. You'd have self-assembling Greatest Hits. Of course the podcast creation tool would have to allow you to drag segments of your audio into an outline to make it work. But then think: an OPML outline that pointed at segments from 4 or 5 different podcasts, then you'd record your own "bullets" on the outline, hit "Publish" and you'd have a single podcast that allowed you to easily quote and reassemble and react to others' podcasts. Alex Barnett: OPML Mashups. Cristian Vidmar: "Not exactly a slashdotting, but you can see I've been "barnetted"!" Taskable is an RSS and OPML browser that lives in the Windows taskbar. Stepping through groups of RSS feeds is like going through a Windows app menu. In the traditional sense, the app doesn't really have a UI of its own. That's kinda cool. Michael Parekh: "Do Dave Winer and George Carlin share more than a passing resemblance, or is it just me?" That picture makes them look alike, but a full face view would show the differences. eHich: It doesn't frigging matter what format it is, in my opinion, as long as it works for me now. I need tools, not specs. OPML: First it helped me consume, now it will help me create Right now most uses of OPML are about consuming data -- lists of links, lists of RSS feeds. What's interesting about the current crop of OPML applications is that they are empowering people as creators, not just consumers. How? Well, OPML could make your blog radically more useful to you. Why? Blog posts are rendered in reverse chronological order as a convenience for the reader. But what about the person who writes that blog? Is it useful to them to see their posts in reverse chronological order? What if my blog appeared to me as a browsable index, a sort of file cabinet I filed posts into, but readers saw it as a "regular blog" -- a page that allows them to identify where the new material is effortlessly by appropriating the conventions of text, where we start at the top and move to the bottom. Fred is using the OPML Editor to publish to his Wordpress blog. I've done this too, it's cool. Clint Sharp: "My friend Raymond is getting some attention for his love of OPML.. As is typical of format geeks, there’s a debate over on Raymond’s blog comments about why you’d use OPML over XHTML ordered and unordered lists. When are people going to realize that 99% of people don’t care? I’ve been involved in more format discussions than I care to remember, and in the end the reason RSS and OPML will become popular is because Dave Winer goes to the effort to develop tools rather than writing specifications and hoping someone will write tools for them." Clint is a developer for a tool I really love called FireAnt, which does for videoblogs what iPodder and iTunes do for podcasts. It's great, check it out. DLTQ talks about the future of screencasting and what role OPML might play in it. |
Last modified: Friday, November 25, 2005 at 2:05 AM.
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