Grazr got a write up in Mass High Tech, a journal of technology in New England. (Via Eirepreneur) 
OPML, meet S5 
Anyone who has been to any geekier conferences has probably seen S5, the Simple, Standards-Based Slide Show System, which uses XHTML, CSS and JavaScript to make the browser in to a PowerPoint replacement.
It's great. I used it in my Semantic Web talk at BarCampLondon 2 and it is so much more pleasant to use than PowerPoint. Especially because you can drop your S5 presentation in to your FTP client and have it up on the web!
Only problem is that I like to use an outliner (the OPML Editor) to work on my presentation. Either you end up rewriting it all in to XHTML by hand.
All of those aren't exactly desirable. So, instead, I've figured out a better way of doing it. Use XSL to transform OPML in to S5-compatible XHTML.
I've written an XSL stylesheet which takes your OPML and does just that.
The root nodes of your outline are the titles of each slide. This imposes the not-unreasonable demand that your slides have titles - even though I'm not sure whether it's required in S5.
The child nodes then become an unordered list. A 'link' attribute triggers a hyperlink to be created and the 'url' attribute to be the 'href'. You can use HTML elements in your OPML and it'll render that in to XHTML. Be careful to close them properly!
Child nodes of the child nodes are added as sub-nodes.
And here's a cool bit. In S5, you can attach 'handout' notes to your slides - which won't appear on screen but will appear on your print outs. These are marked in the XHTML by a new 'div' with class 'handout'. If you wish to add handout notes, you can do so by adding a child node of the root nodes and setting it to "comment". You can do this in the OPML Editor by pressing Ctrl + (on Windows) or Cmd + (on Mac). The node should now have a "<<" icon next to it in the outline. Each of thse will become a 'li' element in the new outline. It should, like the normal list processing part, operate recursively.
What is outputted from the XSLT is not a full HTML file. Why not? Because you should tweak the presentation yourself! My tool will give you the guts of your slideshow, but the idea is that you ought to import it in to the document and edit it.
You could use XInclude to include the output inside your document - I'd recommend setting XPointer to include the second 'layer' of output.
I'm planning to make an S5 tool available on my website which would allow you to draft your presentation in the OPML Editor, save it to your OPML.org space, hit a button inside the Editor and then be able to have your presentation automatically created on the server, which you can then either download and customise as a normal S3 presentation or just present straight away with. According to Eric Meyer's website, the technology is public domain - so it should be quite simple to make an S5 server.
And, I'm planning to integrate Dublin Core and hCard in to the server-side tool. When you create your S5 presentation, it'll pull the data from your outline, ask you for some meta-data (title, your name, your e-mail, website URL, company name etc.). All of those will be semantically-marked up as an hCard and as Dublin Core metadata using eRDF. I'm looking in to how to use eRDF to markup other metadata.
I know that Dave Winers' earlier outliners (ThinkTank and MORE) were used by people to develop slide shows, and subsequently outliners have been in software like Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple's Keynote. I've tried both and found them rather kludgey as outliners. With the OPML Editor, we already have a great outliner - and a nice platform to build on top of.
After all that, I've got some code to show for it: opmls5.xsl. The application will follow - and most of that will be available publicly as GPL. Until then, you can use the W3C Online XSLT 2.0 Servlet to convert OPML files in to S5-capable chunks of data.
Now, the important bit - to sit back, watch a movie and think up a slightly snarky 2.0 name. 
Update: Peggy in the comments says that what I've done has already been done - here. Cool stuff. I'll still build the web application side of things - I think the way I'm doing it is going to be a little bit simpler, since it doesn't require text/xml delivery (though will certainly use it - it's XHTML after all!) or client-side XSL.
Dialogue with extremists?
Harry's Place (via Stephen Pollard) claims that Dialogue with Islam is a Hizb ut Tahrir front group. Wouldn't surprise me if it was. I went along to a Dialogue session a while back. It was quite amusing. The room was split cleanly down the middle. On one side of the aisle were a group of almost totally insane men. On the other side of the room were a mixture of Muslim women, liberal Muslims and secularists. A friend of mine who is involved with this sort of thing tells me that gender separation in academic and quasi-academic environments is shockingly high.
If Dialogue with Islam is a Hizb ut Tahrir front group, then I guess I'm funding extremism. I paid all of £3 to get in.
