OPML Lists : topic search engine
A follow on from my Prefound post.
Services like clipclip, squidoo, jeteye, H20 Playlist, Listible, etc…are alternatives to a traditional search on Google when searching topics.
These services enable people to make topic lists, so searching these services for your topic term, will give you a ready made researched list, the idea is the work has already been done for you, so why waste time collating sites yourself.
I see Prefound very similar to the above list services, but it is focused on search just as much as making topic lists.
The reason these services are different than social bookmark services is that each entry is a defined list, whereas in a bookmark service each tag is a loose set of entries.
ie. you could have a tag called “Folksonomy” with articles/posts/services/applications, etc…about folksonomies…whereas a List Service is more defining, you could make a List about Video folksonomy blog posts, and then even describe that list with tags.
So with all these services you have to make these lists within each service, what about opening up a little bit…
you could make lists with lots of tools, what about an outliner…make your list then import into PreFound or any other service via OPML.
If these List services enabled OPML, then we could also export our Lists, and view them elsewhere or pass them around.
What about an OPML List search engine, just export your List (wherever you made it) via OPML.
Then search the OPML List engine in the title field and you will receive a number of lists matching your term (these lists will be packed with links about the title of the list naturally).
Or just search full-text, this will show results where the term appears in the title of the items in each List, as well as the title of the list, and as well as the tags that describe it
…imagine if it would search the full-text of the webpage of every link in every list.
You could even make a great list of links in a blog post and tag it…if this blog post had its own OPML then this too can be registered with the OPML engine.
There is still a place for all the social sites, but if they all OPMLified we could aggregate all the tagged lists into an OPML engine…so basically any list from an outliner, blog post, favourites web page, Social List site, etc…could be submitted as long as it had OPML.
I guess OPML is a way to aggregate all the lists and items within these lists into the one place for search and discovery.
How will the engine know, when an OPML List is harvested, if it is a topic list, or a reading list, or just a text outline, we don’t want just any old OPML. Maybe the best bet is for people to submit OPML topic lists so we know they are really are lists, and also for for the OPML engine to harvest lists from Social List sites as these sights are designed to create lists.
NOTE: this is reminding me of my post on an OPML Reading List folksonomy or engine.
This is great, via OPML output we can leverage all the lists made from these sources into one big OPML List search engine…this would rival google when it comes to topic discovery, and it will also rival a meta-social bookmarks service as Lists are so much more specific than a tag name, and lists can have tags anyway.
I really think Squidoo push this further into making a simple list into a descriptive, encyclopedic type of webpage…also note that Squidoo Lenses aren’t just Lists, they can just be about something.
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