ON "MY OPML FILE" TURNING INTO A WHOLE LOT OF STUFF

MANAGING MY STUFF

Scanning through the tech memeorandum headlines this Thanksgiving morning, this headline caught my eye: 

"My OPML file is one of my greatest assets"

It's penned by Raymond Kristiansen at DLTQ.org.

OPML of course, stands for Outline Processor Markup Language, delivered with passion to the world by Dave Winer (found at Scripting News).  As Wikipedia explains in spartan prose:

"OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML format for outlines. Originally developed by Radio UserLand as a native file format for an outliner application, it has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange lists of RSS feeds between RSS aggregators.

The OPML specification defines an outline as a hierarchical, ordered list of arbitrary elements. The specification is fairly open which makes it suitable for many types of list data."

As Johnt over at LibraryClips adds:

"Your OPML file not only reveals your interests but your behaviour or degree of interest (attention data)."

From a mainstream point of view, it's a list.  Whenever you subscribe to RSS feeds on the web, via Bloglines or My Yahoo! or other newsreader, your "RSS bookmarks" as it were, are saved in the OPML format.   

For most of this year, I've gotten into the habit of making regular backups of my feeds in Bloglines, since they contain over 1200 web site feeds that I've collected over time that interest me.

These sites  include not just web sites with text, but also with audio (podcasts), video and other data types.

They represent a fair amount of browsing on the web and finding things I'd like to continue to keep track of, however regularly or not.

I'd hate to lose it and have to try replicate it by memory...so I agree with Raymond that it's a valuable asset.  I'm not sure it's one of my greatest assets, but agree that over time, it can be.

Especially if web services were developed that allow this list to be monetized.

And Raymond to his credit, qualifies his intriguing headline above with the words:

"I cannot say this today, but sometime in 2006 I will."

He goes on to explain:

"By then, my OPML file will include my list of subscribed rss feeds, it will include links to the blog/videoblog entries I have made myself - or just the ones that I like the most myself, and it might also include information from my vault at root.net. If I want to, I could give all this attention data away to anyone who wanted it, but I could also sell it, treat it like a real monetary asset."

Other posts in this "discussion" provide examples of how OPML files can be great proxies for a user's attention over time, as this post titled "Attention, Cars and OPML"  by Alex Barnett illustrates.

While I agree with how OPML files can become as important as other real-world documents in mainstream life, I do have a pedestrian question.

The discussion above assumes there is one central OPML file that aggregates all this user attention data over time.

Reality though is much messier.

As I look at my own situation, I have "OPML assets" scattered all over the place.

The biggest one is at Bloglines as I described earlier.

But I've also got a burgeoning OPML file over at Yahoo!'s "MyWeb", along with other increasingly important ones over at Del.icio.us.

And as other tagging and RSS aggregation sites proliferate, I'm likely to have another half a dozen more at places like Digg and others.

Where is the centralization?

How do I integrate all this stuff into one large file?  Or do I ever get to do that?

And if I do manage to do it once, how do I keep all this STUFF  updated and sync'd going forward?

I realize these and other questions will be answered by new software, products and services that may barely be the gleam in some Web 2.0 entrepreneur's eye, but feel they're worth saying out loud from a mainstream user's perspective.

To paraphrase the venerable George Carlin, we need a better way to keep track of ALL of our OPML STUFF.

Happy Thanksgiving ALL!

P.S.

Do Dave Winer and George Carlin share more than a passing resemblance, or is it just me?

Comments

[Dan Hayes]

Look into Onfolio. It keeps track of all your RSS feeds as well as web pages, documents, etc. Have used it for a month and I'm hooked