Wikimania is raising a very interesting question for me–where can OPML play a role?
Aug 5th, 2006 by jimmoore
I am anticipating a very interesting session by the librarians tomorrow at Wikimania. Bela and I have been corresponding with a number of them by way of the OPML community, and a number of them use OPMLworkstation and OPMsearch, our open web-based services. It will be fascinating to hear them discuss various approaches to knowledge and knowledte access. Several of them work in wiki and OPML, and the crossover between these two worlds is high on my mind.
Wiki’s and OPML have each have evolved in distinct communities, and with distinct founding visions, and have gained special strengths:
Wiki strengths include the following (I may well have missed some important one’s, if so, let me know):
Wiki’s are held together by hypertext links, and thrive on free-form
linking..This enables a rich range of connections and references.
Wiki’s have undo/revert functions, and versioning, built into every
page. In discussions with Dan Bricklin and others I have come to see
this feature as fundamental to maintaining quality control in a
distributed community. “Rolling back” the code is an important practice
in software development, and it is also important in knowledge-base
development.
Wiki’s have been promoted as an application rather than a technical
standard and an application, and this may have increased adoption of
wikis by simplifying the “pitch” to new members. Basically, folks only
need to get that they can write stuff on the web, with others.
Wikipedia and other lead uses, such as Intel’s corporate wiki, have
demonstrated the enormous value of peer production to create valuable
repositories of content. This in turn has inspired others to focus on
community knowledge, and it has also helped others–by the existence
proof–think big in terms of how high and broad a vision one may be
able to realize.
The wiki world has been brilliant in focusing on bringing the content of the wider world into the online world–encyclopedia, how to, employee knowledge, political campaign field intelligence, and so forth.
OPML strengths (again, I may miss some, so let me know..)
The OPML systems are simpler to use, because essentially each OPML page is just that, a page. Links among pages happen naturally as one creates outlines and manipulates them.
OPML, like RSS before it, is structured to be organized, indexed and searched. Thanks Dave.
OPML pages can easily link to HTML, RSS, or OPML files, and one can traverse outlines to their end points, hoping more or less seamlessly from file to file across multiple outlines.
Ethan Zuckerman reports on an important discussion in his session:
conversation: given that we