Alex Barnett's blog : OPML

Moving my blog

alexbarn — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 21:38:00 GMT

OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog.

RSS feeds, OPMLs and Grazr

alexbarn — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 22:37:00 GMT

Kevin Briody of the Windows Live team has published the RSS feeds he subscribes to as OPML files for your feedreader. Some good feeds worth checking out there, including a bunch of Windows Live individual employee and team blogs.

Kevin, one way of displaying these as a blogroll is to use Grazr. Below is your OPML file for the Windows Live team blogs rendered inside the Grazr ui:. Just wack in the url of any OPML file here and then copy and paste the code...

I have to update my OPML file, but you can browse mine at my blog's left hand nav.

A crack in this fine social scene?

alexbarn — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 08:17:00 GMT

John Udell has raised a point triggered by the Share Your OPML (SYO) OPML experiment that I've not even come close to thinking about regarding the 'my data' meme.

"I presume there is no longer any argument about data export. If I contribute to blip or mefeedia or dabble, I'll expect to be able to easily get out what I put in -- or else I'll go somewhere that does ensure simple, high-fidelity export."

OK, got that...

"But I also want to extract and creatively reuse the amalgam of my contributions and other people's contributions, within and across these services. That's much trickier. The essential creative act performed by these services is, again, the creation of a community of contributors."

Yeah, yeah, got that too...but what's the point???

"How these services respect the creative rights of their contributors, while at the same time asserting their own creative rights, is a thorny question indeed."

Ah, yes. I hadn't thought about that. Or have I chosen not to? But the more I do, the more my brain slushes and mushes. Micro-drm? Nooo!

Update:

Shortly after posting this, I saw this post by Jason Calacanis (and this by Richard). I think my post title could just as well apply to this 'buy out' idea too.

My musical attention (data)

alexbarn — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 03:56:00 GMT

Earlier this month I mentioned that at the Content 2.0 event I asked LastFMs product manager, Matthew Ogle about the ability to export my data out of the system so it could be plugged into another. After all, the music I listen to, for how long and when I listen to it, user-defined tag and ratings, is my data - my musical attention data.

Matthew responded with a resounding 'we're planning to - absolutely'. I asked what format they would use and there Matthew admitted he wasn't so sure. An open standard, yes, but which? Is there one than can carry the data? Or does one need to be created? Offline, we discussed a few options.

Now, apart from the principle that my data should be something I can use as I like (meaning I should be able to export it out of the system that was used to generate that data in a non-proprietary format), there are other reasons for why you might want to 'own' your musical attention data.

At the basic level, my music library needs to be expressed in a way that allow me share with other people and systems (I'm not talking about the actual music file here, just the metadata). Today you can export your Window Media Library info from Windows Media Player (you need this plug in - it works with WMP 10 and 11 beta), but there is no music library standard, let alone one that can include other attention data.

Now, there are few playlist formats (including open standard formats - W3C's SMIL and Lucas Gonze's XSFP), but a playlist format is not a music library format. Playlists are collections of tracks.

Mike Torres proposed a good idea, one that comes at this from the perspective of music subscription services. The problem that Mike highlighted is that once you've stopped paying the subscriptions for the music your preferences (musical attention data) are lost along with the access to the music.

"Think about it; it isn't the actual bits on your hard drive that you care about - it's the fact that you spent 43 hours last month searching, previewing, and selecting that music. It's the metadata associated with the songs that's important; the actual WMA files aren't where the value is. You don't want to repeat the effort. Why treat your music subscriptions any differently from your RSS subscriptions? Those are portable. Your email archives and bookmarks are portable. Your music subscriptions should be too.
"

So there are two things here:

1. An open standard format to describe a music library. Scenarios it would support include:

Exporting and Importing - taking my music library out of a system to be able to plug into another (this is the music I like)

Sharing - publishing the library on the web (not the actual music, but what music)

2. An open standard format to describe the attention data about the music (how often I listen to which tracks, when I listen to them, how I've tagged them). Scenarios it would support include:

Recommendation - plugging in my musical attention data to get recommendations

Mike goes on to propose OPML may be a good format for the cataloging requirement.

"just let people export and import their subscription libraries natively via OPML."

Yup. Tom Morris had the same idea So did Kosso (OPML Listening Lists) and others.. In February, I even made listening list out of OPML. In fact, given that Podcasts are delivered via RSS enclosures, it's no surprise to see podcatching services have been using OPML as a 'directory' formats- import and export away. Some are share them while others are hacking to force the function.

Thinking out loud now, where do we go from here? Well, on #1 above, back to the Window Media Library export. It exports to a number of different formats, including XML. Maybe it could export OPML? Or someone could build a plug-in to transform on the fly? I don't know, but in this case it doesn't seem too far to get there.

And on #2 (the musical attention data format) - couldn't the attention.xml format (more on this here) be used as the basis for a musicalattention.xml? Sorry, just crazy thoughts...

MSReadr (or, RoboScoble)

alexbarn — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 10:01:00 GMT

The Windows Live product teams have a number of blogs, some hosted on MSDN and others on MSN Spaces.

Now you can keep up with all these in any one of four ways.

1. Subscribe to a single feed Atom or RSS flavor) that aggregates the various posts

or, 2. Visit this web page (called MSReadr) that renders that feed content onto a single page (RoboScoble.com also works ;-)

or, 3. Whack this OPML file into your feedreader.

or 4. Check out Liveside.net (it seems to have most of the Live team / individual blogs covered).

via Niall.

By the way, dev.live.com is the new developer center for Live stuff went, er, live last week. It is called Windows Live Dev. As a beta, of course.

Here is that site's feed (one of the feeds that appears to be missing from MSReadr).

Coping with Information Overload (video)

alexbarn — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 17:19:00 GMT

About four weeks ago I made my way over to ZDNet's studios in San Francisco to be interviewed by Mike Elgan for DevSource and discuss a number of topics close to my heart. The video (15-ish mins) is now published.

Mike asked me about microformats, tagging, information overload, OPML, attention data and of course web 2.0. From the article introducing the interview:

"Are your users drowning in data, and you have no idea how to help them navigate through the information available? It doesn't help to know that you're the only one without a life preserver. Fortunately, the Web is evolving, and new tools are being created to help you — and the people you serve — navigate the expanding information space.

...In our latest DevSource video, Barnett shares his expertise on Web 2.0, OPML, tagging, data programmability, and microformats."

I tried to stay away from pure geek talk and instead talk about some of the benefits and the application of the various technologies we discussed. I touched on Dave Winer's Share Your OPML (see my post on it here), Greg Linden's Findory, the Del.icio.us bookmarking service, Josh Porter's 'the Del.icio.us lesson', and enterprise tagging.

Thanks to Mike Elgan for thinking of me and asking such well researched questions :-)

The interview is part of the DevSource video interview series. Other interviews worth checking out are with Rob Howard talking about the evolution of ASP.NET, Jakob Nielsen discussing usability, Jesse James Garrett (who coined the 'AJAX') on AJAX and the Jeremy Bailenson interview about virtual reality.

Tags: web 2.0, tagging, microformats, attention, opml, video, interview

Share Your OPML (it had to happen)

alexbarn — Mon, 08 May 2006 09:08:00 GMT

So, who would have thought that OPML would be a big deal? ;-)

The interest in Dave Winer's latest project, Share Your OPML, is the reason for OPML's Attention this weekend. And with good reason too. Dave hinted at this project at last week's Seattle Mind Camp where we discussed Attention. This app / service is so inline with the OPML as an Attention data file thinking.

I've shared mine here. The service doesn't offiicially launch until Monday, but there's already plenty of OPML sharing going on. Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington and JWynia are blogging (and sharing) this too, and plenty more.

Nice thing is I can see who is sub'd to me. So far on this two feeds (one gen'd by this blogware, the other is a Feedbuner feed I created in September.

Who's Sub'd to Me...

Alex Barnett blog (feedburner - this one's better ;-)

Les Bain	118
Alex Barnett	593
Rod Begbie	232
couchblog	274
Peter Giger	49
Bela Labovitch	100
Tom Morris	334
Chris Pirillo	1441
Robert Scoble	99
TibsBits	102
Kate Trgovac	134
John Tropea	53

Alex Barnett blog (the other feed)

michael arrington	373
Alex Barnett	593
Christian Cadeo	310
Darkwookiee	154
Brian Johnson	96
paulbwalker	119
Murray Robinson	20
cori schlegel	402
J Wynia	457

Most prolific subscribers:

Here's the top ten as they stand right now (how many feeds they sub to)

1.	Chris Pirillo	1441
2.	enoch choi	960
3.	Larry Borsato	678
4.	Douglas Sorocco	638
5.	flycook	636
6.	Alex Barnett	593
7.	Cyb Alive	519
8.	Randy Charles Morin	486
9.	JDo	476
10.	J Wynia	457

-
Update: I just realized there was a 'show me people who have subsciptions like mine' thing. Very powerful affinities: Here's mine (top ten most like my OPML file)

			Strength
1.	Pete Gilbert	548	19.667
2.	EirePreneur	45	11.501
3.	Randy Holloway	219	6.052
4.	Robert Scoble	99	6.012
5.	Jeff Clavier	289	5.337
6.	Peter Giger	49	4.833
7.	Dave Winer	414	4.728
8.	John Tropea	53	4.663
9.	Richard Hamilton	192	4.632
10.	Eddie Dickey	151	4.613

-
Tags: OPML Attention RSS

Live.com and OPML

alexbarn — Fri, 05 May 2006 07:00:00 GMT

New feature (among others) on Live.com:

"- OPML

Request: can I export my rss feeds that I’ve subscribed to on live.com in OPML format?

You can now do this: click on add stuff -> ‘advanced options’"

This may not seem like a big deal, but I think this is significant in its own little way. You see, most RSS readers / aggregators allow you to export your subscriptions (and not just import them) as OPML.

Up until now, Live.com was the only one I knew of that didn't have the export function. That was a deal-breaker for me. That's changed today. I like it :-)

Remember folks - it's YOUR data.

Tags: RSS, OPML, Live.com, Microsoft, MyData, Web

Attention 2.0

alexbarn — Mon, 01 May 2006 08:29:00 GMT

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

(er, that's Attention two Dot oh, folks...)

The Seattle Mind Camp 2.0 Sunday session on RSS and OPML led by Dave Winer was a fascinating hour, spent discussing, well, RSS and OPML and more. In the room were around 50 geeks, some with little or no knowledge of OPML (all knew of and or used RSS). It was an intimate affair.

A great deal of the discussion revolved around the Attention, often explicitly. We kept going there, it just gravitated naturally in that direction. What struck me this morning is how there appears to be great deal of common thinking around the Attention topic. Sooo much to do and sooo many opportunities before us. Now, I realize this was an uber-geeky crowd but they were very receptive to the cries of 'it's my data!!'. Edge cases, or early adopter? Who knows

It's a shame Dave wasn't able to attend the session I ran last night entitled Attention and My Data where for the time I gave a talk based my writings and observations (and podcasts) on the subject over the last year and a half or so. I spoke of Goldhaber's 1997 essay, Information overload, Attention data, the evangelizing of Attention by Steve Gilmor, the Attention trust principles, Attention Engines and Attention Lenses, OPML as Attention Data and the notion of 'your Attention Data being yours' and my 20 thoughts on Attention. From my perspective, it was useful exercise. I tried to tie a number of related strands together into one coherent story, one that I hopefully will have nicely polished by the time the Content 2.0 event happens in London this June 6 (I'm booked to do 15 mins preso on Attention there toward the end of the day).

Like I said, Dave Winer's the session was intimate - the crowd was small in numbers but smart and included the likes of John Musser who runs ProgrammableWeb and Sean Lyndersay, a Lead PM for RSS at Microsoft,

(John and Sean )

(other smart geeks such as Jack William Bell, Dennis Hamilton (aka Orcmid )

But of course, this has to be my favourite (English spelling) pic of my Seattle Mind 2.0 Flickr set:

>>An aside. Yesterday was the first time I met Dave and today was the first time I heard him in the real-world talk about his perspective on the potential of OPML. There is something about the 'real world' level communication the seems to ensure that what is being said is more penetrative to the ear and mind. I'm not talking about the interaction side here. I'm talking about the listening bit. It's to do with the focus I have as a listener I think - the words can be the same when I listen to a podcast or a watch an video interview, or read the written form yet the 'liveness' provides a whole other level of immersion for me. I had the same sense recently at Mix06. Listening to Tim O'Reilly up close and in person seemed to make sure I really tuned in, and so 'grokked' more of what he said, even though the ideas themselves weren't new to me. Today, I grokked more.<<

Up early tomorrow AM, I'm off for a secret mission in Fran CanDisco. Will blog later...(not very secret)

My Attention writings

Tags: Attention, OPML, MyData, MindCamp 2.0, Web 2.0

Microsoft.com Feeds Directory

alexbarn — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 06:29:00 GMT

The Microsoft.com Communities Team have been busy developing an RSS (and Atom) based Feed Directory.

So what is it?

Well, let's think of this way. Microsoft.com is one HUGE site. For all intents and purposes the site can be considered as a multitude / network of hundreds of sites with common UI(s) and platform(s). I can't remember how many 'pages' of content there are but it's safe to say we're talking millions (the MSDN Library alone is gigantic).

So, with all this content, how can customers locate what is of interest and then get updated as and when that stuff gets updated? RSS right? Well, RSS is good once you've located the content you want to subscribe to, but you need to find the feeds first - and trawling through the millions of pages for the RSS you're looking for isn't really...practical. The search works ok, but it's not feed orientated. So, this is where the Microsoft Feeds Directory comes in.

Say you're looking for feeds relating to Media Center. You can browse the directory structure or search the store. In the search scenario you could enter 'Media Center' into the search box. then you'd get this:

You can then subscribe to the feeds that are recommended. Which is cool. Now, as Dave Morehouse (the Feed Directory PM) points out, this is an early release and the team is looking for feedback:

"The bits officially went live on April 20, 2006 on the Community Labs cluster. The directory can be viewed at http://labs.communities.microsoft.com/rss/default.aspx

And we want feedback! Tell us what you like/don't like so we can work on improving this resource for visitors to MSCOM who want/need Microsoft RSS feeds. Either comment here or comment directly in the directory using the "Provide Feedback" link."

It's the first time I've seen the directory and really like where the team are going with this. I consider this a significant step towards providing a set of APIs for third parties into Microsoft.com's content store and platform (something I'd really want to see, but that's another story). Some ideas you might suggest and you might like to see* in future releases of the Feed Directory:

Leverage the MSN Search 'Advanced Features' UI. Today I can search for "Media Center" (with quotes) to home-in on the results I'm looking for, but most Microsoft.com users won't know how to do that without the UI that surfaces the features
Along the lines of the Working Network's OPML-o-mater, I'd love to be able to build a selection of feeds in a session that I like the look of and save the collection as an OPML file so I can whack into my RSS / Feed reader (to start off a simple file to save to desktop would be great - more advanced are things like 'Add to MyMSN' (or Live and other My services) or even generate Microsoft.com url address to point to for reading lists and on-the-fly mixed-burns)
I'd like to subscribe to the search results as a feed so I can get individual items / posts / articles into a single feed (à la search.msdn.com/search or Icerocket)
My final suggestion is to do with the categorization of the blogs that turn up within the results. Currently, MSDN / TechNet bloggers register their site on an internal directory with a pre-defined taxonomy. So for example, I could register my site as 'Media Center' and 'C#' site. The problem is that this doesn't really work - some bloggers (quite a lot I've found) register against these categories but rarely post about them (nothing malicious - they feel they they 'might' post on these topics so registering against these means that they'll turn up in searches where categories are used to provide results - as they are on the Feed Directoy). So the results beyond the first few results do not necessarily reflect relevancy. This is similar to the Technorati Blog Finder problem I've written about previously. This may not be a technology problem but more of a categorization behavior issue. That said, using an approach of tagging at the post level and ignoring the blog categories altogether might solve this. Anyway, I'm rambling here...sorry.
My final, final suggestion is to provide a programmatic interface for third parties ;-)

I'm sure the team has thought of all of the above and got some (if not all these) these features on their plan (I don't know), but just letting them know what ~~I'd~~ you might like to see :-)

* ;-)

Anyway....tell Dave and the team what you think.

Tags: Microsoft, web, RSS, OPML

Social Search

alexbarn — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 19:50:00 GMT

Business Week has an article outlining some of the 'social search' developments underway at Microsoft. What is 'social searching'?:

"Microsoft plans to unveil a question-and-answer social-search tool in the coming months, says Justin Osmer, senior product manager for MSN. The feature will let users direct questions to a specific universe, such as a group of friends, rather than to get automated lists of results from a generic search engine"

In the same article, it hints at similar efforts by Yahoo and Google but points out that the advantage that Microsoft has over competitors is the 205 million IM and 230 active Hotmail users.

(I should point out my usual disclaimer at this point and explain that I'm not privvy to any of Microsoft's social search product plans at this stage).

It's an interesting direction and one that follows on from the 'using your social network as a filter' idea. Today, the 'live' internet of content is filtered via my OPML file (and anyone esle that is using an RSS reader). The blogs posts I read, articles pointed out and discussed, photos and music suggested happens mainly via my OPML file. My OPML file is one cut of my various social networks. Extending this to the 'liveness' of knowledge in the form of instant answers via your social network looks set to be a major area of innovation over the next couple of years.

Update: Memorandum and Megite have some good links to others' thoughts on the story.

Tags: Attention, social software, social networks, search, Microsoft, OPML

Some Crazy OPML hits

alexbarn — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 09:54:00 GMT

There is so much going on in the OPML space. Hard keeping up. Some Crazy OPML hits for you:

Lisa Williams - The Blog on My Keychain (update: here's another post along the same lines by Matt Mower)
Crazy Cool Grazr uses
Bela Labovitch - New OPMLWorkstation release
John Tropea - Newsmastering feed folksonomies
In Search of OU 2.0...URL Pipes and Pipelines
Dan Ayers - Outline Processing in 1968 (those were the crazy outliner dayz)
Kosso has his opml.org blog running again. To celebrate he has Beard 2.0.
Paul Kinlan - Serializing OPML via an OPML Object Model [OPML]
Dave Winer - OPML to Wiki
Adam Green - Bitty. OPML viewer. RSS viewer. HTML viewer. Viewer viewer and 'What the hell am I doing with OPML? (been meaning to pint to that last one for a while)
Peter A. Bromberg - Fun with OPML in ASP.NET (Ph.D not required)
Dan MacTough - XBEL to OPML (if you're asking yourself what what XBEL is, here you go. If you're asking what OPML is then it's really time to move on from this post)
Mr J Corbett Mapping out Web 3.0
Agenda for OPML Camp (May 20-21 2006 - be there.)

Tags: OPML

Seattle Mind Camp 2.0

alexbarn — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 02:25:00 GMT

Excellent. I've registered to attend Seattle Mind Camp 2.0 taking place April 29 to April 30 (yup, three weeks time!). Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome is sponsoring - I suspect other sponsors will be announced soon.

If you can, you should go too, but don't dilly-dally though - the 150 tickets will go fast. If you want to know more about what to expect check this mini-documentary.

The first Seattle Mind Camp was mind-blowing. Great fun - met great people and discussed crazy stuff.

As per last year, I'll be maintaining an OPML file of attendees. If you're going too, just leave a comment here with your blog / site url, I'll do the rest.

Pic of last year talking through the OPML 101 screencast.

This year I want to do something on Attention. At the first Seattle Mind Camp, Andy Edmonds ran a technical session on attention.xml. This year I want to get a broader discussion going on the topic.

Tags: seattlemindcamp

Go and OPML yourself

alexbarn — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 07:58:00 GMT

Go and OPML yourself.

I did.

Why? 'Cause I'm an idiot.

A happy OPMLish idiot.

Tags: OPML click to get the big picture

'myware' but without the 'my'?

alexbarn — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 04:41:00 GMT

I have to agree with Steve Gillmor on this:

"All proprietary clouds of data obtained without the users' permission are tainted, and it's my bet (GestureBank) that given a choice between an open pool and any proprietary one, the open pool will implicitly be more trusted."

Not surprising that I would agree, I suppose. But why?

Well, as Kevin Burton of Tailrank points out the sp*ware companies are getting into the Attention act:

"Looks like Claria wants to enter the Memetracker (or customized home page) market by shipping a browser based toolbar."

So here's the thing. In this discussion with Kevin we both concluded that the ability to 'own' (manage, edit, purge, delete, share, not share, etc) *your* attention data is the right way to go (well, we've agreed on this ages ago, but we agreed again...).

On a parallel track, the observation Kevin makes of Findory is a good one - the 'implicit' nature of *some* what's going on. Findory's recommendations algorithms are very good indeed. But, from my perspective, it is has a great starting point: a subset of my attention data - my OPML file. From there it uses my clicktrack behavior on the Findory site to recommend content to me. A very rich pool of content - I've already told it what interests me via the OPML file I pointed it to. To stress - in the case of Findory the clicktrack recording is limited to my behavior on Findory. That's it. And that's ok. (Findory's developer Greg Linden might point out at this stage that the OPML file is not necessary to provide a very relevant experience - just a few clicks in one of the pre-defined channel such as 'technology' would do it. I'd believe him too - he's the guy who built Amazon's recommendation engine that's made the company a gazzillion dollars. My point here though is that it is my OPML - the people I want to read - are my uber-smart attention filters. They write about and point to the stuff I'm really, really interested in and Findory acts as another layer of value on top of that.)

Claria's proposition is that it'll track you everywhere - 'myware' but without the 'my'. Can you edit the data it tracks? Can you export it? Can you expose it to another service and treat the data it collects as your data? Is it your data? Nope, nope, nope, nope and er, nope. Sounds great doesn't it?! Install software that tracks your everyclick so marketers can spam you! Lovely! Sign me up!! Not.

This is where the Attention recorders come in (as Jon Galloway pointed out in the comments to my related post). This is where Steve is coming from. There are others thinking this way too. The questions I have are:

which of the Attention recorders will play an open Attention data game?
by open I mean - which attention recorders will allow the users' data to be edited, viewed, shared, purged, exported and controlled - fully - by the user?
and which of these recorders will act as a service that others services (or people) can connect to (or locked out) with the user's permission?
and...which developers of the newstrackers, aggregators, attention engines and raft of other services that would benefit in accessing that data with the user's permission will be smart enough to see the opportunity here by allowing the third party, *trusted* recorder-provisioned, user-controlled attention data pools to plug in?

I've still not got the GestureBank invite. But from everything Steve has written about his idea it looks like its going to set the standard in the open myware / mydata / attention data / recorder / connector scene.

Tags: Attention, mydata, myware, OPML, web, tech, web 2.0