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

OPML Search shows a fun example here of open playlists–do you like Blues music?

The Playlist Layer of the Web

The structure of the web ecosystem is changing rapidly, with a new layer emerging on the web: the playlist layer. At this point the playlists that make it up are fragmented and mostly proprietary, but a world of open playlists is as inevitable as the commoditization of any other layer of the web.

In the next world, meaning now, folks do not want “search results,” they want playlists. They want these playlists to be easy-to-use, dynamically-updated, relevant, of high quality, and easily accessible. They want these playlists to be open to innovators–that is, to content producers who may not work with mainstream media companies. On the other hand, they appreciate “curating” and list editing, reputation services, and in general, human intelligence (humint) applied to sorting out wheat from chaff.

The iPod is not a music player. It is a playlist manipulator. It is the most elegant playlist machine available. Tivo is not a video recorder, it is a video playlist machine.

The competitive evolution of Playlist Ecosystems

The ecological elements necessary for a successful playlist experience include much more than the playlist. The experience includes search, “playing” and display, etc. Indeed, it includes much more than those even. The experience system, the value chain, begins far upstream, with creative communities. And it moves far downstream, or rather, it moves closer and closer to the user/experiencer–it literally moves into the earbud or video display.

Each of the major playlist leaders is seeking to maximize the effectiveness of its playlist ecosystem. As we will see below, many elements are necessary.

Each leader must find one or more dimension of the ecosystem to excel on, in order to gain customer interest. Each leader must make sure that its ecosystem is not seriously deficient in some aspect of the ecosystem, such that it cannot meet basic customer needs.

Each ecosystem must achieve operational integration to function reliably and efficiently.

The ecosytem must achieve “experience integration” so that the customer can be as passive as possible and yet gain the experience he or she wants–including, ironically, interactivity. Does the person with the iPod want to groove on the music, or play with the controls? Note, by the way, the success of the iPod shuffle. No controls, all groove.

All of this effort comes together at the customer experience–and indeed, the customer experience has multiple dimensions, including pre-purchase, use, and use-justification and sharing..but that is another story yet again.

For now, consider that each of the major playlist competitors is seeking to maximize the “wow factor” in its version of the sytem. The wow includes the “intimacy factor.” A furniture maker recently said to me that the thing that architects don’t understand about furniture is that a piece of furniture defines a world of intimate textures, of touch and smell and color, of feel and heft and a range of postures..furniture is intimate.

Apple playlists are very high on intimacy. As are all high fashion accessories. Indeed, the bag, jewelry, shoes and other accessories business–say, Gucci–is about the creation of small, especially delightful worlds of intimate experience.

Core elements of a Playlist Ecosystem

Creative community

Content design

Content production

Content distribution

Device design

Device production

Device distribution

Storage

Addressing

Source targeting

Search

Playlist display

Playlist saving/tagging

Playlist sharing

Play selection

Play

Experience

Grooving

Community grooving

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Ecosystem-to-ecosystem competition

The most important competition in the world is the fight for playlist ecosystem leadership. This competiton is driving billions of dollars of investment, including research, product development, and acquisitions. Why is this fight so important to the competitors? Because it is a fight for control of access to digital culture. That is, access to digital knowledge, digital music and video, digital commerce.

Companies are the strategic movers and investors, but the unit of competition is not at the company level. The companies in turn are seeking to create winning ecosystem designs, ecosystem installed-bases and incumbancies, and ecosystem-supporting-user-communities. The companies are competing, ironically, to collaborate. To win they must collaboratively co-evolve the most powerful and inclusive collection of content, partners, users, and experiences.

Consider some of the major playlist ecosystem definers in this light:

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft are competing with each other to make playlist ecosystems based on their strengths in search results

Their ecosystems produce dynamic playlists that are profoundly inclusive and comprehensive. This is a strength and causes them–or at least Google–to be the first stop on the web for those seeking playlists. It is also a weakness, because results are very broad and of uneven quality.

When you think of a playlist with a million elements, you realise why the end of search-results-as-we-know-them is just a few months away. This problem is an opportunity for Rollyo and other playlist-from-search-results companies.

Google and Yahoo ads are perhaps the most successful of playlist ecosystems. They are richly supported by the “user-generated content” of advertisers large and small.

Essentially, text display ads are small e-commerce playlists, targeted nicely, convenient display, with quality discipline by the advertiser pays business model and the requirement that ads be clicked-through to continue to be shown.

iTunes playlists and the music industry

A playlist ecosystem that found a way to graft onto and extend one of the most important pre-web playlist ecosystems–that of the recording industry. Pay-for-play, payola, “heavy rotation,” “album-oriented-rock”–all playlist inventions of the recording industry working with its marketing arm, radio.

ITunes is a proprietary format, but very open to content producers, including not only the record industry but bloggers. Very good wow factor, intimacy and identity factor at the experience-end. Steve Jobs knows how to combine wow and intimacy.

Mobile phones with music download and streaming playlists

This ecosystem is the big sleeper in the competition. It is grafting playlists onto communication. A very powerful incumbancy. Proprietary formats, proprietary display, inconvenient and comparatively closed to content producers–but with many many many more devices in place than any other platform: an up-and-comer, obviously. iPod has about 90% share of its narrowly-defined class of devices, but it has a very small share of the digital player market–and it has no streaming capability. Phone companies don’t get “wow” very well, but Motorola and Nokia are teaching them.

Steps Toward an Open Playlist Layer

So what does all this have to do with XML and especially OPML?

Create a seamless, interoperating world of playlists and their embedded perspectives

First, we need to be able navigate within a seamless realm of playlists, in order to be able to find content of interest to us.

OPML is a language of playlists, expressed in XML. We need to be able to translate playlists out of their proprietary formats, and into shared formats that allow for mixing, matching, comparing, extending, analyzing and improving playlists. This needs to be done in machine formats, not by having web users read playlists in one format, say iTunes, and type information into another format.

XML was originally designed to connect two or more databases where the formats were incompatible. XML has become much more. It has become a universal language for expressing web content, a language that enables transformation of web content, a way of syndicating across networks (e.g. RSS), and a way of carrying references to content stored in open repositories with permanent addresses (e.g. RSS enclosures and podcast audio and video files, as well as OPML attribute-based references to URLS). XML has always been conceived as dynamic, that is, as constantly changing based on whatever content it expresses or links to. Thus XML is purpose-built to be the core of a dymanic meta-layer above open content on the web.

Second, we need to make plain the perspectives embedded in any given playlist. We need to reveal the assumptions implicit in and expressed by a playlist. By contrast, today the most widely-used search engines of the static web and the “meme-trackers” of the dynamic blog world proudly hide their algorythms.

Thus today’s search engines have at best a hidden bias in their results and at worst hidden censorship. When the logic of a search engine cannot be examined, and/or when there is no practical way to compare search engine logics with alternative approaches, authors, and purposes, we are at the mercy of unseen and unspecified/implicit world-constructing-logics. These logics shape our perceptions of the online world, and they do so at the very moment we are least reflective–at the moment that we truly need to know something.

By contrast, OPML playlists can be open, they can have identified authors, and if they are machine-generated their algorythms and rules can be published and examined. The most efficient way to accomplish the meta-analysis of playlists is if they are in the same or similar formats, and XML is the obvious and probably the only reasonable format to choose.

Open up silos of exclusive content

Content elements such as audio and video files, data elements, and digitized texts need to be accessible freely and directly from playlists. Our vision should be that all content elements are reference-able from any playlist in any format operating from any place on the web. We need to clear the fog from the basic stuff of the web.

Currently, most content is isolated into silos. Blog content is an instructive exception, showing us some of what is needed, and proving that an accessible content layer can be achieved.

Blogs content–”posts” are easily reference-able because they have “permalinks” on each post, and these permalinks, as well as the URLs for the HTML pages and the RSS feeds from the site, are open to anyone on the web.

The simplest form of playlist in the blog world is the hyperlink citation from one blog post to another. Indeed, a playlist can easily be developed and maintained with href lists in blog posts.

Aggregators such as Bloglines are playlist management services for users who read blogs.

The web itself is architected to be open in terms of content. Universal access to elements of content, with a universal resource locator system–yes, I’m smiling, this is what a URL is–is the nature of the web. But over the years the open nature of the web has been reduced as search engines and other tools have become necessary but black-box intermediaries between content and user.

Harvard and the Golden Disk

Today the worst silos, from an open culture standpoint, are those where data is exclusively bonded to curation and search. For example, Harvard is digitizing its entire library resources. Currently Harvard is paying the cost of digital cataloguing, physical preparation and shipping of books to a central scanning facility. Google is paying for the actual scanning. For this, Google is returning to Harvard a “golden disk” of digitized material–but Harvard is precluded from making these contents available outside the university unless pays Google for each page thus distributed.

Meanwhile Google is keeping its own copy of the golden disk, and will make available the same pages–but only if they are accessed through its search engines and whatever business model it deems appropriate for itself. Thus the contents of the Harvard libraries will be digitized and stored, but not open to the playlists of the world’s scholars unless those playlists are created within the Google playlist ecosystem.

One would obviously hope that the contents of the second largest (after the Library of Congress) and most global library in the world would be made open to playlists of all sorts.

Indeed, the “right” answer is for Harvard to set up the contents on open servers, with permalinks as in the blogging community, and let anyone with a blog anywhere make their own references to the documents. These blogs in turn would provide the first universal playlists to the world’s richest trove of written knowledge and wisdom. Bloggers could share references and lists of references, and the result would be a universal library, curated by an unlimited number of curators, working from anywhere in the world.

Public Outlines authored by jcorbett, click here to enter a vast and endlessly fascinating ecology of playlist-of playlists providing dymanic, continuously fresh engagement with Irish personalities of the online world.

The base of the web is made up of millions of URLs. Each URL calls forth resources from web servers. In some of the most interesting cases, these URLs go to MP3, video, podcast, and 3d files. Millions of individuals tend to these gardens, making them as varied and delightful and personal as possible.
Search engines search for these files, catalogue them, and make them available to the rest of us.

But since the early days of the web there has been another way to find resources: Directories. Indeed, before search engines there were directories. Think Yahoo. Many directories have persisted and grown, despite their lack of visibility.

Lately directories have made a comeback. Podcasts, podcast directories, reading lists, Apple iTunes playlists are all directories. Why are directories helpful? Frankly, they can be much more targeted and helpful than search engines, their structure is transparent, and complex sets of results can be ordered and made available in a practical manner. You can with relative ease traverse a directory tree down three or four or more levels. And we are now seeing cool directory-enhancing software like Grazr, which is specifically intended to facilitate “grazing” across levels of deep and rich trees. Trees are coming back.

OPML is the open language of trees. OPML is the Open Playlist Markup Language of the web. OPML is the leading edge of an XML layer that is growing inexorably across the web, on top of and as an alternative to conventional search engines. Indeed, most of the innovation in search now is putting search results into trees–Rollyo–as well as using trees to limit and focus searches. Hybridization of trees and search.

Finally, the rise of “direct navigation” promoted by companies like Name Media is a direct assault on search engines by companies that provide branded directories, such as Photography.com. As these sites have proliferated users have responded, with increasing frequency typing search terms directly into the URL bar, and typically hitting a directory run by one of the direct navigation companies.

The web is changing once again. A new layer is developing. That layer is all about directories as a primary structure for organization access to web resources. It is about separating resource objects from structures. It is about having multiple structures pointing to the same resources. It is about the web as a layer of objects, “described” by outlines. It is about venn diagrams as the new way to think about the web. Venn diagrams that surround sets of resources. Venn diagrams that overlap each other. Venn diagrams that themselves can be searched and sorted and made sense of. And most important, Venn diagrams that are the results of user creativity, collective user creativity, of millions of people.

At the top of this post I highlight the Open Irish Directory, a famous and important set of sets written by James Corbett. Enjoy!

Consider search engines. At this time in history there is really only one general purpose, web-wide search engine, Google. How does Google Page Rank really work? Do you know? I don’t. Larry Page does. Larry Page is a good guy, as far as I can tell. I shared a bus ride with him a couple of years ago, and enjoyed talking. But is it really the best for the peace that one person is in charge of connections ? How long will that be ok? For a year? For ten years? For a hundred years?

Google is an intermediary between me and the riches of the world wide web. It is an amazingly powerful and effective intermediary. I use it regularly, and I appreciate its power. I genuinely like Google ads, because I often find useful sources among the advertisers.

On the other hand, I envision a world where there are many search engines, many directories, many alternative ways to connect and create montages of the content available on the web. I envision a world where each person and each team and each organization continually putters with a kind of “knowledge surround”–a knowledge household, that provides dynamic, continuously updated access to the pulsing, transforming, continually-evolving digital universe.

Interestingly, in the world of blogs there has not been a consolidation of search capabilities. Instead, there are hundreds of meme-trackers, aggregators, and specialized search engines available. Indeed, on many blog hosting sites, including this one, each blog has its own search capability.

In my view, this is good. We benefit from diversity and competition and collaboration and evolution in search.

How has this happened? Because blog content is highly standardized and most of it is available in XML-based RSS and similar formats. It is pre-structured and thus open to searching.

One would hope that all content would be as open to multiple search approaches. A few days ago Charlie Nesson of Harvard Law School pointed out that Google has an agreement with Harvard to digitize the contents of Harvard’s libraries. These libraries are second only to the Library of Congress in size, and broader (i.e. global and historical) in scope. One would hope that the results of this digitization would be made available in bite-sized bits (bad pun intended) so they can be searched by many different sorts of machines. One would hope that the scanned “pages” made available could be read directly by any web-connected individual, and could be linked-to like blog-posts-with-permalinks. These resources will then become part of the rich “stuff” of common digital knowledge.

What does this all have to do with OPML? OPML is a practical approach to pulling together a collection of elements available on the web. OPML is an elegant and powerful approach to user-created and user-controlled access to elements of the web. Resources that have been catalogued in OPML trees and webs are available without recourse to general-purpose search engines. Sophisticated OPML collections assemble links to direct resources and express relationships among these links and resources. These collections in turn can be searched by any of hundreds of engines–including but not limited to Google and other major players.

What is peace? Well, it is at least the presence of connections. The food web of life is rich and varied. Energy and structure are moved and created, transformed and broken down, renewed and extended.

The web of a thriving economy is subtle, laced with trust and contracts, protected by the strong hand of the law–especially contract law and other “everyday laws” we sometimes take for granted.

The web of society is deep, rich and robust, when the peace has held and human creativity and commerce and care has been free to thrive.

War tears up connections. Sometimes, like surgery, war may be unavoidable. But ask those who actually fight wars what is involved. They, like surgeons, hesitate to offer their services unless truly needed. Tearing up the fabric of life is a tragic remedy.

Peacemakers make connections.

People want to make their own connections across the web. They want direct access to the gems and jewels distributed there. Teams and groups want to assemble libraries and the digital equivalent of card catalogues of the material most relevant to themselves. They don’t necessarily want to access the most popular, the most linked-to material on the web. Indeed, they want to establish their own special sources, they want to make and share discoveries. This sort of activity is not encouraged by general-purpose search systems. The world needs DIY intelligence. Open, plain connections. Unlimited in scope and scale.

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

Knowledge is the new free.

The world economy organizes itself around free resources. Yesterday morning I had a long breakfast conversation with Doc Searls. In addition to being a font of free knowledge himself, Doc tantalized me with an image of the golden age of construction, when timber was free, and stick houses across America were built from it. Now we are in the golden age of knowledge, and each citizen with an iPod carries in her pocket a personal mansion of knowledge, stick-built from digital files.

Knowledge is the new free. What does this mean? It means that the timber of intelligent action is abundant and at hand. The challenge for us is not so much “how to know,” as “what to do” with our knowledge. What design considerations will we apply to our houses of knowledge? Will our stick-built mansions of knowledge be sustainable? Will they harmonize with the planet? Will they contribute to peace and mutual understanding across the vast diversity of human values and life styles? Will our particular mansions hold together, keep out the rain, shelter us from the winds, and allow us to make a home for our families?

OK, what in the world does this have to do with OPML?

OPML is a language for assembling sticks and timber of knowledge into useful systems that can be shared with others, that can be improved upon by a community, and that can be published to the entire online world at almost no cost.

OPML is the architecture of a system of knowledge. An architect of a stick-built home expresses a vision in plans. She draws floor plans (top view), elevations (side view), and specialized drawings for electrical, heating and ventilation, and so on. Similarly, OPML structures, as we will see, are used to assemble valuable pieces of knowledge that are wildly scattered across the web. Just as architects of buildings constantly consult books of materials and catalogues of lighting fixtures, heating systems, roofing materials and windows, architects of the web are masters of locating rich sources of potentially relevant knowledge. The artistry of OPML is to combine sources in an appropriate and elegant manner.

The following chapter is a work in progress.

My intent here is to convey the power of OPLM by revealing its structure, while setting aside for the moment how the language expresses this structure.

OPML, like any successful language, has been pushed by the developer community beyond what it was originally intended to do.

It has been “generalised” and its general capabilities, its most profoundly important capabilities, are being revealed as people continue to push its application.

It has been my experience that a good way to help others see this potential is to explain OPML in the most general terms. Once you see the general structure, which is both simple and powerful, I believe that many of you will then be able to envision even more new creative uses of the format. So here goes:

In structure, an OPML file has looks like this:

Node, Frame, Procedure list

Node, Frame, Procedure list

Node, Frame, Procedure list

Node, Frame, Procedure list

Nodes: Nodes are elements in an outline. The indenting of the nodes enables the author to set up outlines, with a root node, nodes, sub-nodes, and so on as far as you like.

The power of the outlline structure of is that it can act as the definition of a relation–as in relational database. When combined with the node’s ability to reference other code, by way of frames and what frames give access to, and procedure lists and the actions they evoke, OPML can become a vastly open way of reaching out to resources across the entire web.

OPML becomes, with an OPML interpreter, a database controller that takes the entire web as its dataset.

Frames: Frames are like picture frames. They carry HTML and anything that can be conveyed to a browser by an HTML call. This includes widgets. This includes the YouTube and Google Video “embed code” that shows a movie by invoking a flash/shockwave viewer. Frames can display flash animation, animated gif graphics, and Second Life addresses. Frames can show anything that a conventional web page can display.

Procedure lists: Procedure lists are can act as an procedural programming language, interpreted at run time. They are general lists of actions. In OPML these have traditionally been used to refer to other files, either other OPML files, or perhaps RSS sources, podcast lists, and so on.

But the actions in the list can do much more. For example, they can apply CSS to the display in the frame. They can contain Creative Commons and related copyright license information. They can contain meta tags and microformats. They can contain name/value pairs and feed other instructions.

Thus an OPML file has three important structural parts, each of which can be used by a creative programmer to accomplish complementary aims.

In practice, one must work around what I consider a bit of legacy terminology. This is not, I want to emphasize, much of a problem once one understands the basic structure of OPML. But it must be dealt with.

Nodes: Once again, an OPML file represents an outline with one or more nodes. When these nodes are indented relative to each other in the file, they are treated by OPML viewers as hierarchically-organized–i.e., as an outline of nodes and subnodes. This is OP as in “Outline Processing,” Dave’s original and still official meaning for the acronym. The hierarchical nature of OPML makes it possible to express complex relationships among the nodes in an OPML file, as well as among the items referenced by the nodes.

Nodes, in an OPML file, are called “outlines.” In Dave’s OPML terminology an OPML file is composed of many outlines. Nodes are called outlines, according to this parlance, because at each level in a file a node/outline can carry/include sub-nodes below it in the outline. What I might call a single node would be called, in these terms, an outline with only a single top-level member. I am not against this nomenclature and in some ways I agree with its conceptual elegance. On the other hand, after two years trying to explain to others how OPML works, I find that calling each element a “node” seems to work better for most folks. And I note that the same issue exists in everday non-digital outlines, and over time, folks have standardized on having a distinct term–usually “outline”–for a collection of nodes, and another term, sometimes “node,” “element,” “line” and so on, for individual nodes.

Frames: Each node has a field that is not treated as XML by an OPML viewer. Instead, the material in this field is passed through to the HTML interpreter in the associated web browser. This means that this field becomes a frame within which complex HTML can be embedded, and this complex HTML will be enacted when the frame is read by the Web browser. Further, one can embed scripts into the frame field of a node, and these scripts can in turn call Flash and Shockwave viewers as well as other widgets designs.

This frame field is called “text” in OPML. It was originally designed so that what was in the text field not be interpreted as XML. The contents of the “text” field is sent on, raw, to the browser for display to the user. Over time, with HTML, embed code, etc. etc. this text can represent and invoke in the browser a vary wide range of rich text, especially audio and video.

Procedure lists: In OPML, what I am calling procedures are called “attributes.” By convention, if the program reading the OPML knows what to do with an procedure, it does so, and if it does not know the procedure specifically, it ignores it.

Also, by the nature of the spec, the universe of procedures can be added to by the person writing the OPML file.

These two generous provisions bring imporant benefits for innovation in the OPML community. One can write an OPML file with procedures that are widely recognized in the ecosystem of code for rendering OPML, and be sure that these will be treated as you wish. At the most fundamental level, references to OPML, RSS, and HTML files are always supported.

One can also add procedures that are outside of the current universe, and they will be ignored in the positive sense. They will not choke the current generation of code.

On the other hand, if procedures that are added are proven to be useful, they will spread across the community, across the ecosystem of code for interpreting OPML, and will become widely available. The OPML ecosystem is open to profound innnovaton.

In the actual OPML spec, what I am calling “procedures” are called “attributes.” A specific node can have an unlimited number of such attributes.

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I hope this has helped. I find it useful to think in terms of these simple structures. I find it exciting to explore the possibilities opened up by the general use of OPML.

The biggest institutional supporter of OPML over the past several years has been Harvard University.

It is perhaps not surprising that a university would see the potential of an outline-oriented approach to online information. Outlines are a fundamental way to express knowledge.

The generality and power of outlining is most obvious in annotated bibliographies, which are probably the most comprehensive units of knowledge created and shared in an academic community. The libraries, in turn, are organized to help students, faculty and researchers generate such bibliographies and access the referenced materials. Research surveys, summaries of current issues, scholarly papers and books all have a fundamentally outline structure. Indeed, the university itself is structured as an outline: Teaching and research in a university revolves around outlines: the university and its departments, research centers and their groups, majors and concentrations and their required course.

Outlines in turn are portals to other forms of expression. One can have an outline of mathematical equations, an outline of field research, an outline of experimental data, an outline of audio and video recordings, or an outline of Second Life communities.

Indeed, outlines are a central structural metaphor for the university. And outlines are almost always how collaboration is begun (”hey, take a look at this outline”) and how the creative results of collaboration are summarized and shared (”here is an ouline of what we came up with”).

Harvard has long wrestled with how to use information technology to make its knowledge more accessible, both within its own community and, increasingly, with the rest of the world. For the “rest of the world” aspect, see for example today’s post below. There will be a lunch tomorrow at the Berkman Center, with Charlie Nesson hosting a discussion a conference scheduled for next spring entitled “How Open Will Harvard Be to Internet and Society.”

As part of this overall theme, Dave Winer was invited to be a Fellow at Harvard several years ago, and was asked to use blogging, RSS and OPML to help transform the University. If you want to get a rich sense of the times and the task Dave faced back then, read his wonderful piece for the Harvard Crimson, which is available online in blog form, with additons, on the web. This is a classic piece that deserves to be read widely. Here is my favorite excerpt. It is dated April 30, 2003:

I think weblogs are a very big idea. In fact I have a bet with Martin Nisenholtz of The New York Times, saying that by 2007 the top stories in world news will break on weblogs. This is not a merely a bet between gentlemen, there’s real money on the line. I’m sure I will win.

We’re returning to what I call amateur journalism, people writing for the public for the love of writing, without any expectation of financial compensation. This process is fed by the changing economics of the publishing industry which is employing fewer reporters, editors and writers. But the Web has taught us to expect more information, not less, and that’s the sea-change that the big publications face — how to remain relevant in the face of a population that can do for themselves what the BigPubs won’t.

Citizen bloggers in New Hampshire?

One of the best ideas I’ve heard so far came from Mike Clough, a foreign policy expert I met at Berkman. The idea is to somehow give a weblog to any New Hampshire voter who wants one, and then, much as I’m helping people at Harvard get started, we work together to help the citizens of New Hampshire get started.

Citizen bloggers covering the candidates for US president. Everyone who hears the concept goes Hmm, that might work. More than anything, I want the US presidential election of 2004 to be a real election, to mean something. I wonder if many other citizens feel the same way?

New Hampshire, so close to Cambridge, and with the technology so ripe, and the candidates so willing, it seems we may actually be able to route around the professional press and make something real happen this election cycle.

I’ll be visiting Dartmouth College (in New Hampshire) on May 9, and then will return during the summer, perhaps often, to interview candidates, and write about it on my weblog.

Our server is open

We’re just getting started with weblogs here at Berkman. We’ve opened a server, where anyone with a harvard.edu email address can create a free weblog. Our hope is that many people will take us up on this offer, and we can explore the potential of this new medium together.

Toward that end we have regular meetings every Thursday at Berkman, 7PM, see our weblog for details. Every meeting we spend about one hour reviewing the software, I answer questions, take requests, and drill the core stuff every week, so that newbies always learn something, and always feel welcome. Then we spend about a half-hour talking about what we’re learning and sharing ideas on how the technology might be better used.

Dave Winer

Thus began several years of experimenting which saw the first university-wide, open blogging service established at Harvard, and saw Dave convince the New York Times to become the first major newspaper to make available public RSS feeds. While both were Fellows at Harvard, Dave and Christopher Lydon did the first podcasts–which included realtime coverage of the US Presidential Primary in New Hampshire as well as upwards of a hundred interviews with experimenters with blogging around the world. Ultimately Chris took this around the world with web broadcasts from Africa, the Carribean, and South America.

Many of the leading applications of community information technology at Harvard are built on a foundation of OPML. Many Harvard bloggers have moved to outline-based blogging, using the OPML Editor or the OPML Workstation Writer and their associated free open hosting services. Complex, multiple-layered OPML outlines can be easily examined in the Grazr AJAX OPML viewer.

Professor John Palfrey at Harvard Law School oversees a comprehensive online resource on Internet Law in a public set of OPML files which combine course outline, syllabus, and RSS blog lists of experts writing in the field. The result is a stunning summary of the state of a fast-moving field, combining John’s overall perspective with daily, real-time updates from other experts in the field such as Larry Lessig.

John maintains the popular “Blogs for Teachers” public aggregator site, with OPML output, on TopTenSources.

The H20 online educational community, which is a multi-university collaboration to share course materials, uses OPML to make its library of course materials available in an open format. Users can make “Playlists” of educational materials and publish them in open OPML on the site. Anyone can visit the site and use the OPML materials.

Finally, OPML is being used by researchers at Harvard to conduct studies of communities of bloggers, literally around the world. Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices recently used OPML outlines of Global Voices blogs to create a Google-based search service for the Global Voices community.

Indeed, the collected blog subscription information held within Bloglines forms an open dataset, in OPML, that can provide enormous insight into the reading lists of the hundreds of thousands of the web’s core users.

Companies that have been spun off into Cambridge’s OPML Alley include Mike Kowalchik’s and Adam Green’s Grazr, referenced above, as well as our own John Palfrey’s and Bela Labovitch’s TopTenSources, which in turn publishes human-and-machine-edited OPML source lists on many hundreds of topics. Pito Salas’ Blogbridge is the most powerful aggregator available, and allows remote access to OPML feeds–meaning that a complex network targeting shared, dynamic OPML feeds can be readily constructed and will operate automagically. In addition, Pito publishes OPML feeds for use by others, including his Top 100 blogs opml source. Last-but-not least citizen blogger and evangalist Lisa Williams’ (of H2Otown/ Watertown) soon-to-be launched Placeblogger site which uses OPML to provide central access to hundreds of citizen journalists in towns around the US.

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As I compose my book on OPML, I am of course influenced by what happens on the web as I write. I am going to include references where helpful to contemporary, topical material such as the announcement from the Berkman Center below. When I look back, these refernces will provide additional context for the book. In the present, these links and posts elaborate on the theme of the post.

Home - Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Tuesday Luncheon Series: Charles Nesson asks “How Open Will Harvard Be to Internet and Society?”

How Open Will Harvard Be to Internet & Society? That’s the big question for the Internet & Society 2K7 Conference, set for May 31 and June 1, 2007. What would a more open Harvard mean or look like for faculty, for staff, for students, for alumni? Is there an understanding among all as to what open access is? The process and the conversations in the lead up to the Spring conference are integral in the shaping of the conference; Professor Nesson will speak at this Tuesday’s luncheon at 12:30 p.m. about his hopes for Internet & Society at Harvard, but will as importantly be listening to the needs, desires and perspectives of those affected by the policies across Harvard and beyond.

Charles Nesson, with fellow Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, has been chairing biannual Internet & Society conferences since 1996.

Charlie’s preliminary blogpost on this conference: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/nesson/blog/?p=199
Bio: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/charles_nesson

Join the conversation online:
Webcast: rtsp://harmony.law.harvard.edu/webcast.sdp.
IRC Chat: irc://irc.freenode.net/berkman.
Second Life: http://tinyurl.com/s6tv4.

Blog Archive » The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head

With this post I bring to the close my first “blog book. It began with the post referenced above. My first book reflects the somewhat raucous history of three years and seven months in the bloggosphere. With the next post I start a new era in my life and in this blog, devoting myself to the exploration of OPML and new forms of computing made possible by large-scale networks of XML web services. These are inventions that I believe are as revolutionary to the web of today as Hypertext was to the early days of personal computing.

Three years and seven months ago, on March 29, 2003, Dave Winer and I sat at the Berkman Center and fired up my new blog. We were both Fellows, and we shared a very small office on the third floor of the victorian building on the Harvard campus that housed the center.

On April 1, the next day, I made the above post linking to a small paper, a work-in-progress, about how citizens are joining together to become a force in international relations, the governence of the world. In short, how people are working together to shape the future. I focused on (1) informal networks of people who care, (2) the web and interactive media “neurology” which is giving these networks a kind of collective mind and ability to act, and (3) the advance of international institutions and international law, which provides a venue or a forum in which these networks join with sympathetic allies to advance specific causes.

I am commited to digital entrepreneurship in developing nations, as well as to public health and health care initiatives. The bloggosphere, now that I was a part of it, played a rapidly growing and ultimately profound role in everything I was doing.

In 2003 I joined Howard Dean’s campaign for president.

I also continued to worked on human rights action on the web.

In Spring of 2004 I helped start a web-based campaign–still unsuccessful but still alive and growing–to stop the genocide in Darfur.

That campaign was inspired during a session hosted by Joi Ito and Ethan Zuckerman at the first Blogger.con, in response to a challenge by Brit Blaser that each of us take a nation and help get the bloggosphere focused outside of itself.

Through these experiences and more, I was provided some priceless opportunities to join with other creative folks and experiment with social and technical innovation on a large scale, with a fast pace, and with a relentless dedication to pushing the social and the technical orders to their limits.

I continue to be involved in social and cultural change projects. Like many others, I see the latest US election as a positive result of the continuing creativity and effectiveness of progressive socio-technical visionaries and organizers.

However, my main work these days is inventing technology. This is technology for activists, technology for the mind of the second superpower. But it is technology per se. My days are spent designing plumbing and plumbing fixtures (metaphorically speaking) for the web.

Thus I want a blog where I can consider technology visions and challenges and develop a conversation with people who share this interest. This address seems a good place to start it. Guy Kawasaki says that the first rule of blogging is to envision what you are doing as “writing a book.” So this will be my new book!

I hope those of you who are current subscribers stay with me, as I have truly enjoyed our journey together. Even if you do not consider yourself a technologist, please stay if you find yourself at all interested!

I plan to start another blog to focus on human rights, health care, and other primarily social topics, so some of you may want to join me there. I will let you know that address in the next few days.

Thanks, all! Thanks so much for the memories, for the support, and for the criticism. It was all good.

Much love (yea, that is how I feel, so I will say it), Jim

This is BCG - Time Based Competition

Time-based competition has always been critical, but in Web 2.0 it may be the most important dimension of competition.  BCG has worked on this for many years, and has some good shortcuts and visual aids to help an organization focus on time.

Here is a packet of BCG white papers.  One that is fun to see is by Shikhar Ghosh and Gary Reiner.

The most useful visual aid is a chart that shows when a competitor introduces a product, and when one’s own company introduces it, and makes visible the lag.

The most useful idea, I think, is that one needs to create a platform for launching products quickly and continuously.  This is how Toyota and others think about their manufacturing, human resources, robotics, design, and parts-sharing strategies: That is, how much scope can we get from these assets?  And how quickly can we express that scope in market introductions?

By contrast, Detroit tends to see platforms as continually being improved, in order to be able to launch the next generation of product.  New features are “put on the product development schedule” and platform capabilities are designed, developed, tested, and finally put into operation and expressed in products.

What is missing is the kind of thinking that says, “Hey, from our existing platform, what scope can we get?  What new products?  How fast?

And, in addition, “How can we think about development as creating core capabilities that can be shared across many potential products?”

Finally, “How can we use others’ platforms–begged, borrowed, outsourced-to, or stolen, to add immediate scope to our offerings?”

copyright.com - Google Search

Lots of action in the online copyright realm.  The New York Times now has one-click quick-buy licensing of items from the current newspaper, by way of Copyright.com

Copyright.com is a central old-line player in licensing.  It now is going aggressively online with its deal with the New York Times.  Note that New York Times content is the most-referenced by blogs and the blogosphere.  This new service now sets up a marketplace where third parties can get access to that content.  Prices are high–I just checked the instant price on a feature, it was $600 for non-commercial republication on the web for one year, and $1000 commercial.
http://www.copyright.com/

Content.com also has an online solution aimed at corporate employees working with content across the corporate network:

http://www.copyright.com/ccc/do/viewPage?pageCode=au118

Here is an excerpt from the press release on the corporate solution:

Copyright Clearance Center Announces Rightsphere™: First Comprehensive Rights Advisory & Management Solution for Content Users and Librarians

Web-based Service Bridges Gap between Knowledge Sharing and Copyright Compliance

DANVERS, MA, June 8, 2006 — Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), the world’s largest provider of text licensing solutions, today announced the launch of Rightsphere™, a revolutionary Web-based rights advisory and management service that helps corporations promote collaboration and the free flow of published information while respecting copyright.

The first-of-its-kind service, which will debut June 11 at the Annual Conference of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) in Baltimore, is a major advance for companies that place high value on knowledge sharing and innovation. Rightsphere provides a customized, comprehensive view of all rights assets held by a business and delivers unambiguous answers to the common employee question: “What can I do with this content?”

“Rightsphere goes right to the heart of the fear, confusion and complexity that stifle companies from unleashing the value of the content they obtain,” says Chuck Richard, Vice President & Lead Analyst, Outsell, Inc. “It is a rights performance solution with a major productivity upside that knocks aside the logs in the corporate rights-clearing logjam. It captures CCC’s deep understanding of the value of content and the value of rights within an elegant solution for enterprises: deliver more game-changing content to employees with less rights angst and busywork.”

Rightsphere makes information about a company’s content reuse rights instantly available to employees at their desktops, dramatically reducing the time it takes to verify copyright permissions. By consolidating all of these rights assets in a single, easy-to-access repository, Rightsphere enables librarians and information professionals to organize and manage rights by country, city or department. These rights can come from many sources, including CCC’s annual licenses and per-use permissions, licenses obtained directly from publishers, aggregators and other information providers and licenses purchased from rights organizations in other countries. Utilizing Rightsphere’s powerful administrative application, content and license managers can easily add, modify and delete records about publications, rights conditions and other content information.

Global pharmaceutical companies Novartis and AstraZeneca both are working with CCC as charter customers for Rightsphere. Deborah Juterbock, global head of the Novartis Knowledge Center, calls Rightsphere “a key element in our copyright and corporate compliance policies.”

Market Need
CCC designed Rightsphere for organizations that view collaboration as a key driver of innovation and growth. With so much information available at the speed of a keystroke, it has never been easier to copy, forward or e-mail content to anyone, at any time. But regularly distributing content without copyright permission violates most corporations’ IP compliance policies and conflicts with copyright law. Many companies instruct employees to ask corporate library staff for permission before they share published documents. This is a time-consuming process that disrupts employee workflow, consumes hours of librarian time and ultimately slows collaboration and innovation.

To avoid this delay, some employees distribute articles without waiting for permission, violating ethics policies and exposing organizations to claims of copyright infringement. In response, some companies institute restrictive policies on information sharing, hampering the company’s higher mission: to learn and grow. “That’s why it’s never been more important for companies to know what rights they have, and to give their employees access to them—quickly and easily,” says CCC Vice President of Marketing Bill Burger.

“Rightsphere is designed for today’s knowledge economy, in which information collaboration is critical,” says Burger. “Published documents are shared among coworkers, customers and business partners at ever-increasing rates, but old methods of rights approval and rights management have failed to keep pace. Rightsphere addresses a company’s need to boost
knowledge and innovation through better use of its information assets, while also complying with its own ethical and legal policies.”