Alex Barnett blog : OPML

Grazr gets financing and more.

alexbarnett — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 03:48:00 GMT

Adam Green, co-founder and CEO of Grazr Corp who mailed me tonight and let me know Grazr has completed a Series A financing round of $1.5M. Dan Bricklin has agreed to join the Board of Directors too, (the co-creator of VisiCalc and much more recently author of WikiCalc). Nice! Adam has more details here.

Grazr is a publishing tool for feeds. It lets you display RSS, RDF, Atom, and OPML files as a widget on any webpage. All Javascript, so no software download or installation is necessary for someone to view it in a browser.

I've been tracking Grazr for a while now. A year ago, Joshua Porter, John Tropea and I spent some time with Adam on the topic of OPML and its future and recorded the conversation as a podcast. Would be fun to catch up with Adam again and see where OPML and associated tech has come in the last 12 months.

Congratulations to both Mike Kowalchik (original author of Grazr & CTO) and Adam!

Getting Acquainted with OPML

alexbarnett — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 03:25:00 GMT

Amy Bellinger and O'Reilly Media have released a new 'Short Cuts' - Getting Acquainted with OPML.

As its title suggests, it is a great starter if you want get going with OPML...Congrats Amy!

"You've put off figuring out what Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) is all about and what it can do, right?
We'll bring you into the picture quickly with 14 wide-ranging uses for the OPML format including:
Reading lists and RSS subscription lists
Blogging
A wholly new sort of intranet
Process documentation
Instant outlining and collaboration
Distributed directories
Included in this Short Cut are step-by-step how-to examples with illustrations to get you started using and remixing OPML right now."

...Disclaimer: I reviewed the PDF book a couple of times before going live and so I got a free copy :-)

Quick snark: I know of at least one company that could (and should) shell out $7.99 for a copy :-P

Live Search OPML Generator

alexbarnett — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 05:06:00 GMT

Andy Edmonds has posted about the all new Live Search OPML Generator...

"What does it do?: This app runs your query against the Live Search API with the feed: syntax, returning RSS feeds, and assembles an OPML file. You'll get the chance to choose from the results before generating the subscription list."

As an example, here's the search results on the query "ADO.NET". Some great feeds come back: The ADO.NET team blog feed, David Hayden's blog posts as a feed with category 'ADO.NET', Sahil Malik's feed that includes a number of ADO.NET posts, the ADO.NET Technology Preview MSDN Forum feed and plenty more.

What's great is that once you've decided which feeds you want to subscribe to, you select those and an OPML file is generated for you to wack into your feedreader. Alternatively, you could select all, then add the OPML file to your reader and then delete those that you don't want to keep. Or just add them as feeds to read within the Live.com reader.

Another nice thing Andy has pointed out is the potential to create Reading Lists from a search query.

A little less conversation a little more action please

alexbarnett — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 14:42:00 GMT

On APML, I tend to agree with what Stowe has said on the topic and John Tropea has some good thoughts too.

To Marjolein - frankly, I'm getting tired of the attention conversation. Not because I believe it is not worthy idea, but because there's been so much talk in this area and not enough action.

Given my recent trip to Vegas, I'll quote the King to summarize my advice to the workgroup:

"A little less conversation a little more action please"

A social Microsoft.com

admin — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 05:18:00 GMT

There is a team at Microsoft that over the years has delivered some amazing things for the community of Microsoft customers: blogs on MSDN and TechNet, MSDN Wikis, Codeplex, the Microsoft.com RSS Directory, ASP.NET, and GotDotNet to name a few.

More recently people like Dave Morehouse, Korby Parnell, Bob Rebholz, Jana Carter, Doug Seven and Sandy Khaund have been thinking a great deal around some of the trends emerging around social software, and what these approaches can bring to both Microsoft's online presence and its customers.

One of the fun things about this phase of their design process is how they are 'thinking out loud' with some of their plans and actively looking for feedback as they go. Here are a few links as tasters:

Dave's Spinning the Wheels post explores how tags and tagging, OPML collections and collaborative filtering can be leveraged across Microsoft.com
Korby touches on serendipity as a social phenomenon, manifested through software
Sandy considers the potential inherent in the networking of various community 'silos' that exist across the Microsoft.com, its affiliated sites and those run by customers to create a whole much more valuable whole than the sum of its parts.

If you are into 'social aoftware', keep an eye on this team...

Moving my blog

Alex Barnett blog — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 15:38:00 GMT

OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog ....(read more)

RSS feeds, OPMLs and Grazr

Alex Barnett blog — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 16:37:00 GMT

Kevin Briody of the Windows Live team has published the RSS feeds he subscribes to as OPML files for your feedreader. Some good feeds worth checking out there, including a bunch of Windows Live individual employee and team blogs. Kevin, one way of displaying...(read more)

OPML Podcast

admin — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:30:00 GMT

Here's an OPMLish podcast for you, recorded tonight with me, Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea.

It's all about the draft OPML 2.0 spec and a few other things thrown in such as structured blogging, OPML tools, namespaces and microformats.

We had Adam along today as he's been experimenting with OPML in recent months at his Darwinian Web blog. John Tropea also joined us...John runs the Library clips blog where he has been documenting, extensively, the various OPML experiments and tools that have emerged over the last year.

As usual, show notes below. Enjoy!

The podcast (.mp3, 58 min, 13mb) can be downloaded here, show notes below.

OPML 2.0 Podcast - Alex Barnett, Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea

Intros
On the Dave Winer's announcement of the OPML 2.0 Draft - Good? bad? ugly?
Data types within OPML (08:30)
Namespaces in OPML (11:30)
Attention, Attention.xml, namespaces and OPML (13:30)
David on Adam, Adam on OPML and Annotated Reading Lists (19:45)
Structured data within OPML, , Grazr, and Microsoft with OPML (24:15)
OPML Tools: Bitty Browser, Grazr mini, Optimal OPML Browser, OPod and OPML Renderer (30:00)
My Bio as an Outline, The Software I Use and Declarative Living (34:30)
OPML, Structured Blogging and Microformats and Namespaces aren't mutually exclusive (36:45)
What are biggest problems are technologies solving? (42:45)
Michael Arrington's Edgeio, structured blogging, my data and distributed data (45:00)
OPML Camp and who's coming (54:30)

Tags: OPML RSS, attention.xml, microformats, Attention, structured blogging, technology, web podcast,

Reading Lists and OPML Podcast

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 19:33:00 GMT

Last year Dave Winer started to push the idea of Reading Lists for RSS. More recently, the idea of Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing (or Grazing Lists / Glists) has been kicking around.

Its likely that Reading Lists support will become a common feature of Feed Readers / Aggregators.

I think this space is getting interesting, so does Joshua Porter. So we thought we'd invite two people who've been giving plenty of thought to this area, Danny Ayers (I can spell his surname correctly these days) and Adam Green to join us for a podcast on the topic (.mp3 43 mins, 11mb) . We also invite James Corbett, who's been doing a great deal with Readings Lists and Feed Grazing, but unfortunately could not join us.

I've been following Danny Ayers' blog (Raw) for some time. Danny is a Semantic Web developer and technical author and co-author of Beginning RSS and ATOM Programming (which you'll find at practically every bookstore that has a Computers / Software section). We touched on the Semantic Web in the podcast.

Adam Green started programming in 1980, is co-founder and CTO at Andover.Net (later acquired by VA Linux in 2000 - hey Adam, buy me a beer...;-) and now a full time technical blogger at Darwinian Web. Thanks to Danny and Adam for their time today.

As usual, notes and links to related stuff below. Enjoy.

Reading Lists (OPML) podcast : Danny Ayers and Adam Green with Joshua Porter and Alex Barnett

download (.mp3 43 mins, 11mb)

.Notes:

What are Reading Lists?
Why are we getting excited about Reading Lists (04:23)
Dynamic Reading Lists (06:50)
Feed Grazing and River of Feeds model (08:30)
Danny on OPML - here under false pretences
Feed Readers as Data Browsers (12;20)
Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing based on Attention data - Attention intersection has to come soon (14:15)
Dynamic Reading Lists and Grazing Lists are the same thing (but different) (16:35)
Hierarchies, feed lists in RDF and the Semantic Web (Let's re-invent Gopher!) (18:50)
OPML Sampling: J Wynia's OPML Sampler (23:30)
Reading Lists as programmed content by others - Top 10 Sources (25:00??)
Dynamic Reading Lists as Attention-based recommendation system (27:30)
The Web as a data web, Semantic Web
RSS readers/aggregators as Semantic Data Web browser (SPARQL / RDF) (33:00)
OPML, RSS, Reading Lists and simplicity (35:30)
Where's the Semantic Web Demo? (37:30)
Summing up (41:00)
Bonus links: It's going to be a big year for OPML and It's going to be a big year for HTML.
End (45:30)

(I didn't cut the bit at the end of the session as I got a chance to ask Danny about Italy and Derbyshire - these two places rarely mentioned in the same sentence so I thought I'd keep for posterity ;-)

Update: Joshua has blogged it.

Tags: RSS, OPML, Reading Lists, Semantic Web, RDF, Attention, Web 2.0, podcast, web, tech

Attention Podcast with Joshua Porter

admin — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 20:05:00 GMT

This is a two part podcast with Joshua Porter.

Part 1: 43mb, 45min

Part 2: .46mb, 48min

Joshua is a little faint to hear at first, gets a bit better later though, sorry about this.

Part 1 Notes and Links

Turkey, Black Fridays and Boxing Days (intro)
J Wynia's OPML Sampling, attention engine (01:35)
Memeorandum, the echo chamber (04:45)
Shelly is a she (!) (05:40)
Ed Batista on Attention Trust (07:15)
Attention Trust and Root vault (09:00)
Why do we need a third party, why do we need attention brokers? (11:04)
Dave Winer, Danny Ayres, Raymond Kristiansen, Attention.xml, OPML, Attention RDF, microformats (14:40)
Nick Bradbury, Steve Gillmor, AttentionTech podcast
All those RSS users and they don't know it (18:00)
OPML, attention data sharing (21:00)
What did you learn about Chris now you have his some of his attention data? (23:00)
Self-reported attention (27:00)
OPML wishlist: it's my wishlist (30:20)
Mortgage brokers is making money from my attention - attention brokers (32:55)
Why I don't like Attention recorder (37:00)
My wife is an attention data nightmare (40:00)
empowering customers (41:30)
Attention, Buying a Car, and Control - why am i not in control - ? (43:20)
End of part 1 (45:10)

Part 2 Notes and Links

We've already got some feedback to the first half/part of the podcast. In particular I wanted to highlight Danny Ayres who took the time to post this comment. Thanks Danny, we should keep talking.

As I listened to the recordings to make the notes below, I came realise two things: Firstly, how much work is still ahead of us to work it out in this attention management space (but it will be fun - and of course, it'll never end....). Second, it appears that a non-trivial convergence is occurring, one that James Governor recognises and describes as a "quadrangulation of SSE, attention, RSS and OPML that creates the opportunity, no?".

In the meantime, Dave has pointed to Jeff Jarvis' demand to Yahoo! that they hand over his attention data (RSS)!

Back to the podcast: again, Joshua's voice is relatively faint (compared to mine) but it is audible - sorry about this.

Notes and links below.

Anonymous e-commerce (intro)
Identity 2.0, (02:10)
Why should I trust Microsoft with my attention metadata? (04:10)
Kim Cameron, InfoCard, and Identity Metasystem (07:56)
Anonymous personalization (10:45)
What social model fits here? (14:40)
My OPML as my attention data (18:00)
Have you been to a casino lately? (20:05)
Solove's The Digital Person, Orwellian futures, little brothers, and Kafka's The Trial (24:30)
Minority Report, The iris as a cookie (28:08)
Will we have OPML spiders here soon? (29:00)
Feed ranking in readers, OPML as expression of your attention, Attention engines (30:32)
Users will drive the future of OPML (31:30)
Google Base, user-defined schemas, structured blogging (33:25)
user hacks, emergent standards, emergent tags (36:00)
Ajax, Aflax, Flash-based data visualization (40:45)
Hacking is really the only way to innovate, 45:00
End (47:50)

Tags: A ttention, OPML, RSS, attentiontrust, attention.xml, podcast

OPML and Attention Data and Tailrank Podcast with Kevin Burton

admin — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 20:02:00 GMT

Although we met briefly last week, Kevin Burton and I didn't manage to get enough time to discuss some of the things on our mind at the time, so we got a Skype call together and posted it as a podcast (.mp3, 42mb).

We focused the discussion around what he calls Meme Engines and I call Attention Engines, Tailrank (Kevin's latest project), OPML, RSS and Attention.xml (see notes below).

Kevin knows what he's talking about in this space - a veteran of the RSS space, Kevin authored the NewsMonster RSS aggregator and co-Founder of Rojo Networks.

Notes: Stuff we talked about (here's Kevin's take on the chat):

Tailrank
Mathew Gertner's post 'Your Attention, Please'
OPML as Attention.xml, Meme Engines and Attention Engines
AttentionTrust.org, Attention Recorder, Root.net, and what it means
Attention data, its ownership and sharing
'Perspectives' - a way seeing the world through someone else's Attention data on Tailrank. Here's mine (12 hours, Local, Recommended)
This diagram I sent Kevin as a point of discussion for the chat:

Download the podcast (.mp3, 42mb).

Tags: attention attentiontrust attention.xml opml rss

Update: Robert Scoble is listening in.

Attention Podcast: Nick Bradury and Kevin Burton

admin — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 19:47:00 GMT

I asked two of the RSS industry's leading lights to join me for a call and share their perspective on the question of where Attention is going with respect to RSS feedreaders and aggregators: Nick Bradbury creator FeedDemon, part of Newsgator (Nick also developed Homesite - sold to Macromedia - and Topstyle) and Kevin Burton of Tailrank (also co-founder Rojo).

Many thanks to Nick and Kevin for their time, it was great to get their views on the topic of Attention.

Bottom line? Attention is happening.

The podcast (.mp3, 46 min, 11mb) can be downloaded here, show notes below.

Intro What problem is Attention trying to solve in the feedreader / aggregator space? (01:20)
RSS: from information consumption efficiency to information overload. (03:40)
Attention can tell what's not important to you (more gestures) (05:45)
The portability of Attention data (07:25)
Turning OPML into an interchange format (08:10)
On OPML Reading Lists (09:25)
How do we define and standardize on Attention data? (10:40)
Feed and item ranking data, vote rank (attention.xml) within OPML (14:08)
adding an Attention namespace to OPML and Attention APIs (17:05)
Beyond the feed level (21:00)
interaction rank (23:10)
Attention data beyond the clickstream (24:50)
Attention Trust plug in and my attention data (27:50)
Firefox ping attribute (31:50)
The usability of RSS (35:30)
What are the next steps for Attention to make progress? (40:10)
FeedDemon 2.0 beta (44:15)
Tailrank 1.0 (46:20)
End (49:28)

Related: My Attention writings

Tags: A ttention, OPML, RSS, attentiontrust, attention.xml, podcast, web 2.0