Library clips

Fred from TalkDigger has an interesting post on FOAF profiles.

The idea is for each service you register with to ping your FOAF file, that way any updates to your profile (eg. move to another country) will happen automatically for every service you are registered with.

Since OPML is being used for a few different purposes, it could also be used for something like this, the service could subscribe to your OPML file/URL…all you ever have to do is update your OPML and everything does like wise.

I understand that FOAF is a dedicated service for social networks, but since people are becoming savvy with OPML, there’s no reason OPML can’t be used as simple profile.

Related:
RSS for contact information

[ADDED 29/05/06: James Corbett is posting along the same lines]

Share Your OPML is back…just when OPML Factory was looking like a contender.

Register, upload your OPML or enter your OPML URL, click Share, and your sharing your OPML…well done, it’s that easy.

They are probably trying to keep this website simple but I’ll add to the possibilities.

Features

Top 100 feeds
- this lists the homepages and the feeds
- each feed as the number of subscribers
- it has its own OPML URL

Most Prolific Subscribers
- who is subscribed to the most feeds
(but do they read them all)

Who Subscribes To…
- find out who subscribes to a feed

Subscriptions Like Mine
- this must be based on who you have feeds in common with

Here is my OPML
…only problem is that it doesn’t list the feed URL’s for easy subscription, and it doesn’t have my native OPML, that’s a bit silly.

Very simple and effective tool to check out what some people are reading…and discover new feeds from people that you know…a quality based directory.

Check out Steve Rubel’s speculation;

“I can see Share Your OPML becoming another key way to measure a feed’s influence. It’s a natural complement to link-based authority aggregators like Technorati. It’s also more democratic because it does not exclude non-bloggers. The site is open to everyone who reads feeds.”

“If this happens (and I bet it will) Share Your OPML will become an essential tool for marketers. We will use it to understand which feeds have the greatest attention.”
…you can kind do this by looking at subscriber numbers at Rojo and Bloglines…but if all the feed readers get involved then we have a feed attention exchange.

Feedback

Users could tag the Top 100 feeds, like a feed folksonomy…actually they could tag all the native feeds, each tag could have a spliced feed and OPML…maybe you could even read the river of news.

It would be good if you could subscribe to an OPML within this service, so you know when a new feed is added, eg. Superfan for Bloglines…although that’s what a personal feed reader is for (NewsRiver, BlogBridge)

This service is really effective as a personal Reading List exchange, but what about topic version
- submit your favourite library feeds OPML and tag them…this won’t happen for a while, until personal feed readers enable an OPML for each folder you organise your feeds in.
- each topic Reading List would have an OPML, and you could see the feeds inside
- each topic Reading List is tagged, you could grab an RSS feed of a tag, to keep current with new Reading Lists submitted with that tag.

See more about feed folksonomies, and tagging Reading Lists.