OPML editor within a folksonomy
Just the other day I posted how folksonomies such as Wink enable you to share a list of links compared to del.icio.us which can only share single links (Wink can also do this)…Wink makes this possible as every list of links you make in Wink has it’s own permalink in your user account.
So the usual idea is to be updated of new links in a particular list via RSS.
Then I proposed that when you fill out your form to add/edit links to your list, can this form be an OPML outliner…then we could have these neat directory type lists where we could collapse the categories, but most of all they could be shared outside of the proprietary system, such as Wink, because they are in OPML format.
Also being an OPML file means that your list could also just be text, not neccessarily hyperlinks…I wonder if you can add descriptions as well.
Well, Pascal just left a comment on my last post mentioning that Dave Winer is on the case, and he calls these OPML reading lists…his post also mentions Technorati is on board (I wonder from where they will aggregate these reading lists).
As I understand it Dave Winer’s suggestion is that an OPML reading list contains a bunch of RSS feeds…just like your RSS reader OPML file the difference is that you wil be able to subscribe to an OPML file the same as an RSS feed …when a feed is added or deleted in the OPML file you will be updated, so this is kind of similar to Superfan for Bloglines…but more like the OPML for a Bloglines Public Account.
Now what about sharing OPML files where the content doesn’t have to be RSS feeds, the content can just be text or hyperlinks, this is more truely sharing a reading list not confined just to feeds.
Then we need a place to make and share our own lists, like a folksonomy…even manipulate parts of a list into your own list, so I’m suggesting an OPML editor within a folksonomy.
I also think the idea is to use Technorati to discover blogrolls or a topic list of feeds such as BlogBridge does with it’s expert feeds list. So how do you share a list of feeds, in an OPML file of course, just like sharing your RSS reader OPML file at Share Your OPML. At Feedmarker you don’t have to share your whole OPML file you can share an OPML for some select feeds from one of your tags or folders, that is, OPML topic packets.
But at Feedmarker you only have an OPML file not OPML presentation, so these OPML files need a HTML presentation…see comments below.
Summary
The good old days had people making webpages listing their favourite links, as kind of topic lists, or gateways, I think these type of pages are called Hubs in “search engine talk” and some engines like Teoma rank sites higher if links that point to them come from hubs.
Then these were formalised into blogs or linkblogs, but what happened is you start blogging about different sorts of stuff as a blog is more capable of just being a list of links, so you lose the simplicity of the linear list format.
Then social bookmark managers started being the new link blog (although you can’t point to a specific link as most lack permalinks)…you can have many lists organised into tags (permalinks), but what about if you want sub-topics within a tag. So Wink solved this by being able to have tags within tags so to speak, ie. a permalink where you can have a list of links divided into sub-topics.
But this list of links is limited to hyperlinks, what about if you just want a list of text, and it is also limited to one sub-level, so then comes an OPML editor to make outlines (ie. lists of any kind), and the great thing about these is you can intergate, merge, do what you want with them because they are in a universal OPML file.
Now the only thing is that these OPML files need to be displayed somewhere so everyone can read them, maybe a folksonomy.
You could also display them in your RSS reader but when you import the file it is like importing just one feed, so it would be an OPML feed.
So instead of subscribing to the feed of a blog, you are subscribing to the feed of an OPML outline…so I wonder if OPML outlines will be displayed as HTML like blogs (maybe free OPML hosts), then you could have an OPML list to show all your OPML outlines you have made (with its own OPML feed), that’s a bit scary an OPML index for your OPML
What about discovering and sharing OPML files in an OPML folksonomy, what about a OPML music folksonomy…the possibilities are endless
…then a directory engine to discover OPML lists, like OPML Search or OPML surfer.
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Hi John,
Just wanted to let you know you can actually get an HTML presentation of anything you can get a feed for on Feedmarker.
Example:
http://www.feedmarker.com/feed/opml/tags/library?show=10
will give you an OPML file of the last 10 bookmarks or feed in the tag library.
http://www.feedmarker.com/feed/html/tags/library?show=3 (note the HTML in there after feed)
will give you the same thing in HTML.
Of course you can change the ’show’ variable to whatever you want.
The functionality is there, it’s just not exposed because I think it’s way too much for most users.
Hope it comes in handy for you though.
Comment by bborn — October 14, 2005 @ 4:50 pm
Hi John,
Feedmarker actually does have HTML presentation for bookmarker by user, tag, etc. It also have javascript syndication (like FeedDigest, so you can add your bookmarks to you blog).
Check out my post at
http://blog.feedmarker.com/2005/10/14/share-you-bookmarks-in-html/ to learn how to do it.
Comment by bborn — October 14, 2005 @ 5:06 pm
hi!
I am just catching up on my reading - I love this post and the way you think about OPML and the possibilities!
I think that your OPML Packets are called ‘Categories’ at OPML Search. You can now search for all OPML Packets tagged with a certain term.
For example, you can search for all OPML packets tagged as Jazz:
http://www.opmlsearch.com/?Search=jazz&ShowCategories=1
You are right on - we now need the ability to remix OPML packets to produce new OPML
-Bela
Comment by Bela — October 18, 2005 @ 9:29 pm