OPML Editor Roadshow Notes

The dinner was vats of Vietnamese food, at first with no serving spoons. I ate while the AV stuff was getting set up.

I saw Dave on the way in and said "hi." He said long time no see. Traffic was really bad to Berkeley. It took about an hour to get here. Fortunately parking was easy, but I'm sure a lot of people are going to be late.

So apparently the food was supposed to come later, but it came early -- and of course the people are arriving late. So we're doing food first, and the presentation somewhat later. The room is starting to fill up, Dave suggested that we sing a song to start the presentation and was thinking about what song it should be.

It's mostly a male audience, although there are a few women. Nice to see. Tom Abate, who works for the Chronicle, saw my Palm notetaking set up and was interested in how it worked. I put my WiFi card in and what do you know, there's network here. Although I haven't played with the Palm and Web browsing enough to make much of it. This is when I wish that I just had a shell and SSH from the Palm. But for just taking notes in a text file it seems to work pretty well.

Lot's of laptops around, I guess they're online and able to fully browse the Web. I should give it another try before things get started. This blogging tool is not "Radio." The outliner existed in Radio was hidden. The outliner is up front now, and the software is open source. Dave wants to be a developer of developer communities. He wants to create tools.

Dave give his user centered software development rap. So, he's done a "Hello World" blog entry. Changed the blog roll, and now he's demonstrating changing the header graphic.

All changes to the "www" folder percolates up to the cloud. The software on the server understands how to assemble the OPML into a blog. The "decorations" folder contains graphics, etc.

Questioned asked about the relationship between OPML and HTML. OPML is XML. HTML is too much of a mess for programs to do anything with. XML speaks to programs and machines. The OPML editor is also a server. Who knew? Currently the editor only works in Windows and Mac OSX. The editor doesn't yet exist on Linux -- that needs to happen to allow this be served outside of Dave's servers.

Dave is now showing the OPML file format. There's a discussion about the font size of the screen. No one can read it. The font is now large so some can read it. He's showing the Radio subscription list, and the NetWire News subscription lists in OPML. The RSS feed is in there too.

The OPML format has other uses besides the subscriptions. Although he hasn't explained them yet. Dave discussing the political wars over RSS. OPML has been spared those wars so far.

Discussion of link rot. If an RSS feed changes, how do you enter a new one? Dave goes off on permanent linking vs. temporary linking ramble. It ends up being a philosophical ramble about design that aims for perfection vs. the sloppy, approximate design of the Web. The questioner just wanted to know how to change a URL in the application. The answer was more interesting than the question.

Ray Ozzie, CTO of Microsoft, is in the audience. Wow. A C-level dude. Robert Scoble just sat down with a plate of food. He's actually wearing a microsoft baseball hat. Now that's an evangelist. Or a bad haircut.

Dave demo-ing creating an outline in the editor. A list of states by region. He's got another outline that has stuff about Florida. He copies the URL of the Florida outline (through the right click). The Florida outline is on the internet -- and this outline has been added to the States outline. Now he's updating the Florida outline -- and will save it up to the internet. Now what should happen is the States outline, which is subscribed to the Florida outline, should update. The content should flow through to the outline contained.

Dave: "software guys in the room are saying it's no big deal, it's just a pointer. But that's why I built the OPML editor."

Dave thinks this is how DMOZ, and other directories should work. Now he's showing the Podcast directory.

A "Red Arrow" means that you've jumped into someone else's space. It's an outline that someone else is managing. So this allows includes of includes. You can bundle them up.

It doesn't matter where the OPML file is stored. It can be on any server, it just needs to be reachable on the network.

Anyone can include an external outline in their outline, but you can't force your way into someone else's outline.

Dave discussing the creation of crawlers for these kind of outlines within outlines.

Question asked: Can a person edit someone else's included outline? Although this could be done. Dave's software doesn't. And he doesn't think that these subscriptions should be altered. Although he does believe that someone will do that hack because the editor is open source.

General questions about the falsification of feeds. The business model question. Dave says he doesn't have one.

So this is sort like TWiki, where you can include a page in a page -- except the difference is the includes can be anywhere on the network.

Next step on the internet. RSS was a big step, the ability to syndicate content. It's good for news. A good way to find out what's new. OPML is good for knowledge. Good for things that don't change that often, like the order of the planets, or the names of the states. Setting up a framework for slow changing content.

Think about the speed of content. What form is best for what speed of content?

Dave thinks these tools will be easier for creating content than regular HTML. Not efficient for editing text. It takes to many steps to update content.

Question about video and audio. Dave says he's a text guy.

How do you find OPML content to include into your outlines? There's a new OPML search engine that just went online. The URL is on the Scripting News search engine. Funded by some guys in Harvard (RSS venture fund).

Steve Gillmour asks: are there APIs? Dave says it's all APIs. Very easy to connect up to IMs, etc. Has ODBC connectors etc.

OPMLSEARCHENGINE.com

End of discussion. Question period.

Currently the OPML Editor doesn't connect with standard blogging tools like Typepad, or Movable Type or Word Press. So far the vendors have agreed to build in understanding OPML.

Active Renderer -- a create way to understand and display OPML.

What level of sophistication is Dave targeting? Can my grandmother do it. Ultimately he'd like a broader audience, but it's not ready for general consumption yet. It's an iterative process. It'll move in that direction.

In the mid-80s almost anyone could use an outliner, but that thread got kind of lost. Although OmniOutliner has a cult following on the Mac. I heard that the guy who wrote "Memoirs of a Geisha" wrote it in the "Inspriation" outliner.

Originally Dave thought that the professors at Harvard would be great people to put their knowledge online in OPML format. That didn't work. They weren't so interested in publishing in this way.

Email address is included in the outline. It's prey for spammers. This needs to be fixed.

Frontier programmers are hassling OPML Editor Newbies -- telling newbies that this was done in Frontier a long time ago. Dave would prefer they help.

Question: Quo Vadis? Dave says that he wants the community to create the vision. He wants to be part of the team, not the team leader. Doesn't want to be responsible for the future of this.

Orthogonal to Wikipedia -- could be used in concert with. Not instead of. You could make a Wiki out of it.

Started from the Frontier root as opposed to the Radio root -- so some features didn't make it over.

Outliner freaks may be the true community for this. Perhaps the old users of "More" will create some of the content for this new OPML universe.

Pull vs. Push -- Ping servers tell you which blogs change. But if you want new stuff, you still have to go and get it. But this isn't like that, this is better for stuff that doesn't change so quickly.

What about licenses? GPL, can we make sure that included outlines are legal to include?

The evening devolved into multiple simultaneous conversations. I wanted to ask Dave about what hooks there were in the OPML outlines to apply CSS templates, but we had eaten and Dave hadn't. He was weak from hunger. His answer to every question was, "I'm hungry." I let the man scavange for whatever food was left, and I walked out into the night...