Grazing List by OPML Mashup
Adam Green is taking OPML to the limits, check out his lastest OPML Mashup.
What he has done is extended his tech.memeorandum OPML hack to include some extra information about the feeds by cross breeding it with Technorati.
This is the ultimate informed Grazing List…I commend him here, as this is what a Grazing List is about, it’s about shopping for feeds, and what better way than knowing at a glance; the tags, linkbacks, and ranking of a feed, just before you dig into sampling some posts (plus the author name, and a link to the homepage…this is awesome).
This is really getting value from your Reading List, or Grazing List in this case.
Hey Adam, could you still load this into an RSS Reader as a Reading List, considering there are non-feed items in the outline?
I’ve also noticed that fellow librarians are catching on, I don’t doubt a second that OPML won’t be big in libraries, at least in the backend, it’s all about outlining, categorising…just what the librarian ordered.
What I do feel is that Reading Lists will be a major player in the education sector…recommended reading that’s alive, and can be communally edited.
Up until now a teacher created a bibliographic type list of resources (books, journals, etc…) with HTML links…now they can create this list in organised OPML, and if feeds are any of the items, well it is like reading the latest from the book right there in the list.
No longer do you have to login to the school website to access your resource guide, now that it’s packaged in OPML, you can read it in your RSS reader (if it is a Reading List where all items are feeds), or in an OPML Reader (reads any type of item)…or you can add it as an inclusion to your own OPML Directory, etc…OPML frees data, anyone can take an OPML package and run with it.
This has always been possible with Blogdigger Groups, one of the first River of News Reading Lists. A student could keep up to date with the contents of the Reading List by subscribing to the spliced feed, or by visiting the schools version of a Blogdigger group.
Now they can subscribe to the OPML URL of the Reading List, so they don’t have to read a river of news, they can read by feed. Just like the spliced feed, as the feeds change in the OPML the contents will change in your subscription to it in your RSS Reader…so both spliced feeds and Reading Lists are dynamic.
Reading Lists gives you the extra option of reading by feed, and since it is OPML can be read in other services other than an RSS Reader.
[ADDED: this is being called an Annotated Grazing List or Reading List]
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John, thanks and yes it is all a hack.
But it may hopefully inspire real programmers to build better tools to do this. Like Michael Katsevman’s OPML Utils: http://mis.plaice.org/2006/03/05/introducing-opml-utils
As for loading a multi-level annotated reading list into an aggregator, I tried it with Blogbridge and it does the smartest thing possible, which is find all the type=”rss” entries and use them to subscribe. It still shows it as a flat list though. I’m working on Pito and I think we may see much more OPML rich features from him.
Comment by Adam Green — March 8, 2006 @ 12:19 pm