Conversations on Attention, OPML and Attention.xml

re: Conversations on Attention, OPML and Attention.xml

Paul Montgomery — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 12:21:21 GMT

Stop me if I'm wrong Alex, but as I understand it OPML files are quite capable of stopping at the feed URL, they don't include tags for each individual page URL pointed at by the feed file (RSS/ATOM etc). In fact, in my (admittedly limited) travels I haven't seen an OPML file which incorporates each entire RSS file within the OPML file - I'm sure you could point me at an example, but my impression is that including entire RSS files into OPML files is not the default behaviour (and arguably is not desirable).

Thus you can understand my earlier confusion. If the destination URLs are not included in the OPML files, where do you put this "vote"? Do you assume that every OPML file includes the entire RSS file and then puts the vote in the RSS tags? So then you have the voteless RSS file and the included voteful RSS file. Is that what you're after?

I'm quite prepared to be told I have this one wrong wrong wrong, but something doesn't click for me.

re: Conversations on Attention, OPML and Attention.xml

Stewart — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 19:45:23 GMT

an anon "Stewart" not steve! :)

re: Conversations on Attention, OPML and Attention.xml

alexbarn — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 19:53:12 GMT

I see what you mean Paul. I'm hesitent to write the following, because there are smarter and much better qualified people to answer your structure question. But this is how I think about it:

It depends on how this is implemented. OPML files can point to OPML files. One of the OPML files could contain each url and associated 'vote' data. This is what is read by the app using the attention data. The app would look at the url being pointed to (and either follow it to read the data the 'item' contains and 'understand' what the content is about), or look at its exisiting db to see if it has this url cached, and if so is a 'known' url and associated data).

So to summarise, this specific OPML doesn't *actually* contain the content the urls point to, just the urls and vote. Make sense?

re: Conversations on Attention, OPML and Attention.xml

Danny — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 20:21:00 GMT

Enjoyed the podcast (I rarely listen to the things, but just on a whim, glad I did) - my God, the man's English!

I can see the sense in seeing what's needed before looking at how it'll be implemented, and I like your ideas on the granularity issues. But if a structurally constrained format like OPML is the target, then I would recommend trying a sanity-check sample or two. (I tried to prod NickB for a sample, but he declined :-(

e.g. do you nest individual items as outline elements within their parent feed outline? If so, how do you identify them individually, when GUID is optional in RSS 2.0..?
etc etc

re: Conversations on Attention, OPML and Attention.xml

Paul Montgomery — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 10:11:25 GMT

Alex: so what you're saying is that instead of OPML files linking to RSS/Atom files, they link to subsidiary OPML files which act as functionally neutered RSS files which don't contain content but contain attention metadata? And some of that metadata (i.e. visitation history) is stored in application dbs? This is all confusing.

I don't think introducing a third file between OPML and RSS solves the problem - or at least it defeats the purpose of using OPML to do it, since you might as well use attention.xml or some other, richer XML schema. If you want to use OPML to store attention data, it's only worthwhile if you stick to the singular OPML file (IMO). However, due to the very nature of OPML - being a "reading list" which doesn't include content, or even necessarily links to each individual item it references - it would be difficult to justify using OPML to store the sort of item-specific metadata you're after (IMO). Perhaps you've uncovered a significant weakness of introducing attention data into the OPML spec.

Attention 2.0

Alex Barnett blog — Mon, 01 May 2006 08:50:00 GMT

(I had to call this post something and given this pic, I couldn't resist...)

(er, that's Attention...

Alex Barnett’s blog : Conversations on Attention OPML and Attention.xml | Music

Alex Barnett’s blog : Conversations on Attention OPML and Attention.xml | Music — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 07:07:38 GMT

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