Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

This pdf formated-questionaire, which I downloaded from the MIT OpenCourseWare
initiative web site, provides a wonderful signal to students of what is
expected of them.  I’d love to have a similar one for folks we
hire to work on RSS and OPML.

From the Associated Press, by way of Yahoo:

An old friend from the knowledge management world called last night,
was listening to NPR and heard a story about a rock band and
alternatives to the music industry–and thought of Second Superpower
and me–it was nice to hear from him.  THAT’s the kind of call I
love in the evening.  So here is a hello to Malcomb Bliss (whose
day job is knowledge management w Crown Partners).

BTW I went searching just now to see what the show might have been, and could not find it in this directory.
If only they had OPML search.  But I did take a quick look at
Christopher Lydon’s Open Source, which I love, and want to shoot you a link.

BTW2, I wonder how the folks over at Downhill Battle are doing?  Would be nice to connect up sometime soon.

Following Danny Ayer’s comment back to the source, I found this wonderful piece–if you appreciate real life stories–on writing an outliner..

Read here and here.

Just want to share what a trip it is to have the TopTenSources daily OPML summary syndicated as a directory on Dave Winer’s Scripting News site.  Yesterday we did lots of scrambling to
improve the user experience of the directory, to respond to
needs/problems that were not apparent to us until Dave put us up on his directory roll. 

For those in the OPML community who are interested in syndicated
directories, here is a summary of our experiences.  Some of our
“lessons” are relevant only to our situation, but some may be of
broader interest.

1.  Our OPML did not validate.  It showed up on Dave’s OPML directory sub-site,
more or less, but blew up and returned ugly error messages if a user tried
to click through to a post.  This same OPML had validated in the
past, but with the format going through revisions, we now realize that
it is important to validate regularly and proactively.

2.  Our first version of our OPML daily summary was based on a
listing of the items a user could click to from our home page.  As
a result, we  inadvertantly left out a link to the central content
of our home page, which is our daily blog.  After seeing our OPML
rendered as a directory, the omission was apparent.  We added to
our OPML output a link that goes to our daily blog.

3. 
Our original OPML was designed to be used in newsreaders like Bloglines, so we
pointed our OPML to the RSS/XML for our sources.  The RSS in turn
came in many varieties, which rendered poorly in a browser when clicked
on in Dave’s directory.  So we concluded that we needed to rewrite
our OPML to point to HTML links, rather than or in addition to RSS/XML
feeds of our sources. 

Currently we are outputing two OPML files
now from TopTenSouces, one for directory applications and one for news
aggregators.  We believe that we will ultimately be able to output
one OPML file with pointers to both HTML and RSS/XML, and depend on the
application that renders the OPML file to decide what is appropriate.  In many cases the directory
renderer would “prefer” the HTML or incorporate RSS/XML
renderers, and aggregators would prefer RSS/XML.

4.  RSS/XML are usually made available by publishers at the
source/site/or feed level, and our original OPML
pointed to one feed per source.  A problem arises when one
switches from RSS/XML to HTML.  When pointing to HTML, there is
no predictable single navigation entry point to a site.  Pointing
to the
home page of a site is not necessarily similar to picking up the main
RSS/XML feed of a site, and in many cases HTML home pages have special
display programming that makes matters especially
difficult.   Thus we concluded that if we are linking to HTML
rather than RSS/XML feeds, the ten sources in our OPML-based directory
need to be joined by post-level OPML directories that in turn link to
HTML of specific posts.  Here is an example from one of today’s
sources:

Top > Top 10 Sources > Astroblog

5. Once we started using directories like that above, we were
delighted to discover that they were very helpful to users. 
We  liked the experience of being able to navigate two
levels of directory–the overall list of sources, and each source’s
list of posts–before going to the sites themselves. 

A two-level
OPML-based directory made consistent and scanable all of the navigation
schemes across all ten source sites.  This is a tremendous joy, and is
exactly parallel to the increase in scan speed and comprehension that
results from HTML sites being reduced to RSS, and eliminating most
site-specific formating.  OPML directories eliminate most site-specific
navigation formating.

6.  The overall mindblower is that we were able to do our experiments and improvements post
hoc, after Dave linked to us, and in real time. By the magic of
syndication our changes were immediately reflected on Dave’s site, and
experienced by Scripting News users. 

We started scambling around 8
AM EST, and were conscious that we needed to get things worked out
before the west coast woke up.  Credit Bela, Andrew Dallas and Justin
Russo.  During the couple of hours that we worked, we generated some
minor disasters, and of course were freaked out when they showed up
live on Dave’s site.  However, the only way we could test our fixes was by
experiencing them on the site. Strong motivation! When we finally got things more or
less right, we felt a great sense of satisfaction. 

Moreover, through the power of syndication we automatically
provide a new
directory to Scripting readers each and every day, with a fresh
collection of TopTenSources.  Yesterday our focus was online deals and coupons sites.  Today we have ten on astronomy.  Tomorrow, only our
editors know.

Thanks Dave and other members of the community for bringing life to the OPML fishpond!

Addendum:

Danny Ayers had this to say about my previous post on Dave’s directory roll. Here are Danny’s comments:

Sometimes painters who get stuck in their work go back to pen and ink,
or charcoal, for inspiration.  A reduced palette can lead to expanded
possibilities…

I agree that directory rolls can be done with HTML.  On the other
hand, what I found powerful was that OPML gave me a “reduced palette”
compared with HTML, and thus my and others’ directories were stripped
to their essentials and could be easily traversed and scanned, combined
and modified.

Moreover, I suspect that the standardization and structure of directories expressed in OPML may give rise to new forms
of search and sharing and combinations and deconstructions and
interlinking, as are forshadowed/anticipated in the sharing features of
the OPML editor, and in the category (aka “tag”) searches and publishing features of OPMLsearch.

Like HTML reduced and structured into RSS.

The value of directories created by people: a brief history

Dave Winer has for some time been running an OPML directoryroll instead
of a blogroll on his site. What this directoryroll establishes on Dave’s
site is something akin to the original Yahoo directory–a set of
intelligently categorized links that goes deep into the web.  See the original Yahoo directory, October 17, 1996, courtesy of the Wayback machine Yahoo archive. 

Indeed, as David Mercer has stated so well this morning, it recapitulates Gopher and the earliest pre-directory days of the
web. Thanks Dave for this link also, which started my rumination today.  As Mercer says,

Back in the days when Gopher ruled supreme, and the Web was just a
little Cern linemode client icky-ness, where you ‘clicked a link’ by
typing the number by it at the bottom of the screen, Gopher had
structure.

You could search gopher-space, and someone had
categorized that information into a hierarchy just by dint of putting
it up on a gopher site: gopher sites were merely hierarchical menus
that had content as the leaf nodes.

Yahoo and other earlier directories more or less institutionalized the structure of Gopher.

The Yahoo directory required a team of editors, and the editorial team
could not scale with the web.  Thus came, to forshorten history a bit, Google with the page
rank systems.  Instead of Yahoo’s team of trained, paid editors
sorting the web by explicit categories, Google organized the web by
examining the implicit categories of vast hordes of unpaid and
untrained editors.  The links into a site from site rolls and blog
rolls determined important semantic nodes and their interlinked
networks of sites, and then keyword analysis was used to determine the
nature of the resulting clusters.  Google had the advantage of
scaleability, but the disadvantage that human judgment, while still
central to its system, was embedded and implicit rather than direct and
explicit, as in the Yahoo system.

Directoryrolls combine advantages of Google scaleability and the early Yahoo editorial oversight

What is cool is how the directoryroll reintroduces the original
Yahoo vision, of hierarchical lists of intelligently-categorized
selections made by editors, and do so in a highly distributed
participative way.  In the Scripting News example, Dave is able to
maintain his own
top
level Yahoo-style directory, with his own selection of editors, and the
entire structure is kept fresh by the magic of syndication.  Any
one of us can do his or her own
version, too!

OPML-enabled directories combine the advantages of  Google–of scaleability, harnessing
millions of unpaid volunteers, and maintaining an ever expanding
population of “reviewers” as well as “reviewed”–with those of the original Yahoo editorial team.

People are now consciously creating and sharing reading lists and OPML
directories of sites of interest. But more
important, as OPML management tools proliferate people are assembling their own
directories of directories.  That is, they are assembling for
themselves carefully selected groups of web editors, who are themselves
creating and maintaining directories, in the Yahoo fashion.  And
all this is being done in an open and unpaid fashion–sometimes as a
completely voluntary initiative, and sometimes supported by ads.

And every person who has a site can in turn subscribe to OPML outlines
which in turn reference layers upon layers of directories, maintained
by layers and layers of
editors, pointing to vast, folk-structured rivers and oceans of
content.  And all made manageable by easily expandible, scannable,
and searchable OPML directories.

OPML-enabled directory trees are folksonomies on steriods,
personalizable by each of us as individuals, explorable and enjoyable
in aggregate by all of us.

Directoryrolls target dynamic content

But there is another fundamental difference between the web of then and the web of
now.  The most important new web content is dynamic.  It is less a universe of
places, and more a universe of rivers and flows. 

In the case of the Yahoo directory, it’s editors identified
the most
innovative sites of the time, which were in HTML and were static. 
The Google has added blog searches, it’s forte is referencing static
sites.

In
the case of Dave’s directory, Web 2.0, and the world of OPML
directories, new tools help us make sense of a web that flows. 
They help us make sense of meme flows, meme propogation, meme transfer,
memes swimming in a world of feeds.  The new web is based on
continously updated, vastly open sources made
available by the syndication paradigm. These sources are OPML, RSS, and
blogger-oriented, conversational, HTML pages.  They are podcast
and videoblogs.  They are emerging patterns in tag clouds and
across tag-based communities.

Directoryrolls enable participatory, distributed improvements to categories and hierachies

Moreover, the categorization schemes we use to point to patterns in
the flows are themselves of necessity fluid if they are to be
relevant.  The syndication of directories
(e.g. by OPML), in addition to content (RSS), enables people who do not
know each other to
participate in the shared creation of a world of directories, and to do
so in
real-time without the intervention or oversight of any top level
directory owner.  Each incorporated directory in a tree has its
own authors/editors, and the tree as a whole may have dozens or even
hundreds of editors.  These editors are free to modify their
directories as they see fit, whenever they find it necesssary or
helpful to their anticipated users.

Today I experienced this flexibility in a minor but telling way.  Dave kindly put
TopTenSources and its OPML on his directory roll.  Unfortunately, the OPML was messed up and created lots of
uglies when viewed in the renderer.  Yuck!  Fortunately–and this is my
point–we put in a fix.  This required changing in subtle but vital ways the directory
structure and user experience that led to and framed the content on
TopTenSouces.  And when we changed our OPML, it was in turn updated on Dave’s
site.   All this was accomplished without any direct communication this morning with Dave.

Dave Winer just posted on this very
very very important announcement.  Tivo is working with a number
of ad agencies to make it possible for users to search for ads of
interest to them.

This is something I have long been interested in.  Why are
billions of dollars worth of ads pushed to users against their will,
when users demonstrate everyday on Ebay, Craig’s List and
Yahoo/Overture and Google–as well as by their attendance at malls and
other retail venues– their avid interest in discovering, exploring and
purchasing things?

Choice is king, meaningful choice.  TV and Movies have been driven
by users to go from a few channels of content, to many channels, to
modular, downloadable content.

During the same period there has been no progress by mainstream media
to offer choice in advertising.  And yet that is what the consumer
wants.  Witness the rise of other forms of commercial choice,
starting with e-commerce itself.  In ALL e-commerce the consumer
chooses to interact with advertising.  Duh.  This is a
preference. When I want to buy something, when I want to shop, I do not
resist advertising, I embrace it and seek it out.  Help me do this
and I will return the favor and trade with you.

On the contrary, mainstream media spends billions each year on
secretive profiling and “targeting” of customers against their
will.  Even more self-destructively, mainstream media companies
led the fight against ad skipping, when they should have been offering
ad substitution.  Mainstream media companies fought against Tivo
and Replay in their original form, investing in their own “closed”
recording services.  Mainstream media promoted “product placement”
to the point that it has become a joke.  My kids have fun spotting
stupid product placements.

Wake up, folks in the media. Become a facilitator of information exchange, not a blocker.

It is with great pleasure that I share this news.  John is a terrific guy, a prolific blogger, and a genuine leader in the field of Internet Law as well as the Web 2.0 revolution.

What Terry Fisher and the others don’t say is that this
appointment is to the FIRST Clinical Professorship of Law at Harvard
Law School. so this represents an institutional accomplishment for the
law school, as well as a personal one for John and a departmental one
for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Actually, this is also an accomplishment for bloggers, given
that John is either the first or one of the first serious bloggers to
become a full member of the faculty.

Date: 11/19/2005
From: “William Fisher” tfisher@law.harvard.edu>
Subject: [staff] John Palfrey

To all Berkman Center staff and fellows:

On
Thursday, the law school faculty voted to appoint John Palfrey as a
Clinical Professor of Law.  It’s a rather extraordinary
accomplishment, especially for someone so early in his career.
Extraordinary, but richly deserved.  I hope you will all join us
in offering John congratulations — and best wishes in his new position.

Terry Fisher
Charlie Nesson
Jonathan Zittrain

Check this out from WorldNetDaily.

Cindy Sheehan, the so-called “peace mom” on a crusade to end
U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, is publicly blasting Sen. Hillary
Clinton, D-N.Y., for her continued support of the ongoing conflict.

“I think she is a political animal who believes she has to be a war hawk to keep up with the big boys,” Sheehan writes in an open letter posted on anti-Bush filmmaker Michael Moore’s website.
“I would love to support Hillary for president if she would come out
against the travesty in Iraq. But I don’t think she can speak out
against the occupation, because she supports it. I will not make the
mistake of supporting another pro-war Democrat for president again: As
I won’t support a pro-war Republican.”

“I believe that the intelligent thing for Democrats to do
for 2006 and 2008 would be to come out strongly and correctly against
the botched, bungled, illegal, and immoral occupation of Iraq,” Sheehan
added.