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CosmicDread's got a machine out back -- don't tell anybody, but he's got a four-on-the-floor OPML Community server on it. Web Worldviews: Why OPML is More Than Just a Bunch Of Feeds Ext337: "I'm trying really hard to grok how OPML is more than bundling a bunch of feeds." Turns out del.icio.us/Ext337 is built by Marnie Webb, resident goddess of tech for nonprofits, so we can be certain her desire to grok is sincere. Marnie, thank you very much for giving me this starting point, which I think is an extroardinarily fruitful one. Until now, most people have associated OPML with one thing: lists of feeds. Some folks also know that it is a file format that can be used to express outlines. Lately, those who have been following OPML have heard about "reading lists," which are lists of feeds that are dynamic -- that is, I can publish an OPML file of feeds, you can subscribe to it, and when I change the OPML file, the list of feeds in your aggregator changes. Why would you want that? Well, I imagine you attend some conferences in your professional life. Imagine that you could have one-click subscribe to an OPML file of attendees that automatically updated your aggregator with new feeds from the blogs of people who registered for the conference. The list of feeds would change as new items were added, just as an RSS feed changes when new items are added. BUT!!!!! Let us come to a screeching halt and take a dramatic turn onto a new road! Lists of feeds, static or dynamic, and outlines, static or dynamic, as useful and far-out as they are NOT WHERE IT'S AT. Allow me to hip you to the inside scoop: Web Worldviews. A Web Worldview is a lightweight, distributed directory that can be maintained by one person, or a million people. Each person maintains an outline, in which individual nodes on the outline point to a resource. The resources could be anything: a page on the web, a feed, a file, a picture, a podcast. Anything that can be on a network. How does this differ from a web page with links of resources, you might ask? Or a wiki? Two ways: it is ordered, and it is distributed. It is ordered because the author is placing the items in an outline. The author is not just showing you a rummage bin of items, but showing you the relationships between the items, and suggesting a path through the resources, a beginning, middle and end. It is distributed. For a large Web Worldview, many people may maintain an outline which is just a branch of a much, much larger tree. Yet, a visitor will be able to view the major branches of the tree on a single page, even if the branches consist of documents stored on many different machines across the net. Note: I made up "Web Worldviews" off the top of my head. I don't consider it canonical, and you shouldn't either. But if you like it, by all means, use it. I like it because it expresses both the distributed nature of OPML (Web), and because it expresses how OPML can be used to present not just a list of ideas and items, but how those ideas relate to each other (Worldview). I believe that Dave used the term "worldview" in one of the earliest discussions I ever heard about OPML, in relation to a project called Channel Z, which Dave was working on back in his days at the Berkman Center. |
Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 9:25 PM.
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