Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

These notes are a best effort.

Blog your corrections and commentary.

Attendees:

• DaveW: Dave Winer
• DavidW: David Weinberger
• RMack (RM): Rebecca MacKinnon
• LW: Lisa Williams
• MW: Mal Watlington
• SR: Shimon Rura
• EG: Erica George
• j: j Baumgart
• BK: Beth Kanter
• JA: Jenny Attiyeh
• MF: Michael Feldman
• DF: Deborah Elizabeth Finn
• BS: Brett Stilwell
• PS: Pito Salas
• SG: Steve Garfield
• HS: Henrik Schneider
• LB: Lynne Baer
• AH: Ann House
• JM: Jim Moore
• BD: Betsy Divine
• AK: Aldo Kastanita (sp?)
• Note: a whole ton of people I (Erica) don’t know, and w/out introductions I’m not going to get names for most of ’em.

Proposed Agenda:

• Special Guest: Blog group founder, guru of RSS, author of Scripting News, A list blogger, etc., etc. Dave Winer
  • notes for his presentation
  • This meeting has the potential of being quite crowded. Come early to get a spot.
  • Shimon will be at the meeting early to get audio up and running.
  • Steve Garfield will be videoblogging and testing a live videocast.
  • NOTES DURING MEETING
  • A really easy one-click post tool. All is open source, GPL licensed.
  • blogs.opml.org/dave has all the next parts of demo
  • (EG: a lot of this is in his notes so I’m not gonna get it all, moving too fast and I am not a techie)
  • tool works for adding someone toa blogroll
  • nested categories, easy to add a new one – they’re nested just like folders on a desktop. Multiple categories supported.
  • (EG: Betsy is doing live notes into IRC, so if you can’t hear the webcast follow along there!)
  • DaveW: it’s very DavidWeinberger-esque small pieces looseley joined – a blog is made up of lots of little bits.
  • DaveW: Yes, it all resides on my laptop
  • DaveW: The philosophy is that this is an open source project designed for users, goal to be very user-foused. people tools.
  • DF: will it work for a 65-year-old technophobic social worker?
  • DaveW: this is the beginning of the demo – much more to show
  • DaveW: yes, you can just drop in html code. but i’d prefer wysiwyg
  • DaveW: you can do everything that Radio does here, too
  • DaveW: it’s an outlining platform. like macwrite, kinda. it’s an app to create updraft.
  • Dave: now I switch gears to other perspective. application of the OPML that’s already out there, in RSS subscription lists. Aggregators, feed readers, etc. They exchange subscription lists using OPML as a file format.
  • Dave: straight OPML w/out an OPML editor is as messy as straight RSS – all cody and scary to the newbie.
  • Dave: kinda like an rss reader, it does some similar things, is similarly visual
  • Dave: with an OPML editor you should be able to read any OPML file easily. See descriptions of the feeds, etc.
  • Q: can you use CSS in this?
  • Dave: not yet, but yes, that’s important. making things pretty is important.
  • SR: where does OPML get translated to HTML for viewing?
  • Dave: that’s in the backend. (Dave plug’s SR’s frassle.org)
  • Dave: demo of an outline of the states
  • BS via IRC: bbc news uses xsl to format raw rss feeds http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml
    <?xml-stylesheet title=”XSL_formatting” type=”text/xsl” href=”/shared/bsp/xsl/rss/nolsol.xsl”?>

  • Dave: the opml parses new levels of an outline from your blog post in as if it were part of the original opml outline. (Eg: i probably missed the fullness of this here)
  • Dave: this is important cos it means i can point at a level of my outline to someone else, have the outline defer to them at that level of specificity
  • Dave: i throw data up there, someone else uses it. all we have to agree on is how things are named. this is how we did the podcast directory.
  • BK: this is like libraries. if i am the dance librarian, maybe for clog dancing i’ll just link to someone’s clog p[age
  • dave: nothing new in principle, what’s new is the tool to make building these hierarchies easier. a link on the wbe is a total change of context. here it’s a minor change of contexst
  • bk: what does it look like to the reader?
  • dave: see this part in the notes
  • dave: if everyone has an opml editor you don;t need the html version
  • dave: podcasting directory. 2 examples
  • dave: todd maffin: public radio podcasts. directory created in OPML. Most podcasters not only use OPML but hand code it. They love the idea of having a community where eveyrbody’s stuff conencts up to everyone else’s. my job is to make the tool so they don’t have to hand code it anymore. (q: what is todd’sURL for this directory?)
  • dave: everything at casting.opml.org. toddmaffin.com/radio/opml
  • AK: some podcast listeners find casts thru subdcription tools not the web. i have a thing up there under the business category. they see my rss feed it’s not pretty how fix that
  • dave: the answer is to figure out how to have the data programmed so it doesn’t just throw random data at software that doesn’t know what to do with it
  • dave: the convention is that the rrs link in the directory points to the rss feed, that’s functional, but it might be nice to let people know they’ll see mess if they clikc on that
  • dave: podcasting gre too fast. some ppl wanted commerical, some wanted to focus on maiking community tools work. now there’s a split. apple has an itunes directory and ours isn’t the one theyt’re using. maybe they don’t know it exists. adam curry tried to convince them i imagine. you can tell someoen but if they don;’t understand what it is, what it means, they don;’t get it. podcasting is so stripped down that folks don’t believe there’s more. problem of expectations.
  • http://casting.opml.org/Directory%20of%20podcasting%20directories/Adam%20Curry%27s%20iPodder.org%20directory/Podcasts/Categories/Business/
  • JenA: can this also be used for research of obscure data not just podcasts?
  • dave: yeah sure. podcasting was just what was ready to use it.
  • dave: it grew fast. people have to grow to the extent they have enough problems that they need a new tool. david weinberger for example now he is looking for a tool like this, while 3 years ago he didn’t need it. i’m sure this is going to keep going.
  • JenA: what do you imagine apart from what wer’re already doing now?
  • Dave: directories of knowledge. rss was invented for news, stuff that changes fast. this is for stuff that doesn’t changer as fast. where what’s important is the relationship between pieces of information. rss prioritizes currency, newness. the tools get so refined to only show you new stuff. opml is to get you the related stuff. a way of storing the knopwledge. and all the ancillary tools that came up for blogging will come up here and we don;t know what those are yet. we need a rich sea of datat before we know what tools will be most useful.
  • dave: tagging is part of it, delicious, outlining, blogging…
  • DF: and wikipedia, etc
  • JM: my 2 cents is a lot of knowledge work is about reframing what’s there and sharing your reframings of underlying stuff, or your reframing of other reframings. what’s nice about this and UNLIKE a wiki is that each of these things are atomic units, that you can re put together into a new frame. (EG: like legos! 😀 )
  • DF but will this ever shake hands with wikis?
  • Dave: of course it will shake hands with wikis
  • (eg: i missed a bit)
  • MalW: knowledge. intellignece in business etc. business intelligence grows thru solid delegation. knowledge management. how to weight the intelligence withina system. i see hundreds of applications for this
  • dave: idea is to enable ppl who know how this works to apply the technology
  • davidweinbegrer: q re granularity and this as knowledge tool. are there anchors? (dave winer: not solved yet). 2nd, is any provision for saving the context of something that’s copied in? footnotes that remember context. i need a tool to do this, it’s a basic research tool. (copy something and when you paste it in the context/source is retained)
  • dave: i’m at saturation a bit so i can’t think about that whole new thing yet…
  • rmack: application: the global voices aggregator, currently on BlogLines. http://www.globalvoicesonline.org
  • http://bloglines.com/public/globalvoicesonline/
  • http://bloglines.com/export?id=globalvoicesonline
  • q from IRC: Can someone there, at an appropriate time, ask Dave if the OPML editor handles UTF-8 or if it is restricted to the Roman character set?
  • dave: no. but you can add it! it’s expensive and not easy to do.
  • rmack: i want to be able to see each blogger’s blogroll. to drill down, to have that happen automatically. to get everybody aggregated. amny of these people are community hubs for more micro communities.
  • dave: once you have a community those kind of thigns are easy to do. they’re directories then, not just blogrolls.
  • rmack: then the Q is, what to have those bloggers do to enable that?
  • dave: Ok let me show you this:
  • directory.ipodderx.com/opml/ipodderx…. missed rest of URl
  • directory on ipodder anyway
  • dave:someone does have to create the directory. you can’t just scrape their blogroll
  • dave: it’s hard to get people to do that. you find international bloggers who do have their own directories. maybe try to convert some of your people but don’t worry re converting them all. you join this community, find other opml users who also share the global voices interest, build it from there. lead by example.
  • davidweinberger on IRC: i just blogged this: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/004232.html
  • dave: think about next steps. what can YOU do.
  • OK, DINNER
• Amanda Watlington graciously agreed to change dates to accomodate Dave’s visit to Cambridge. Her talk is tentatively rescheduled for July 28.
• Next week: CC Chapman & Andrew Grumet on Podcasting, Gigadial, and Satellite Radio
• Well wishes for Gregory
• j: Thanks for the help last week. I won’t have an update for the group on Thursday.
• What else?
• Eat:
  • Where? Bombay Club
  • Last week: Smile Thai again

live audio during the meeting (hopefully)

IRC chat during the meeting