Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

At the Thursday night Berkman blog meeting, Dave Winer is demo-ing his OPML editor, an outline editor. The room is crammed like the cheap seats on an incumbent airline. (OPML is mainly used these days as a way aggregators import/export lists of the feeds you subscribe to.) It lets you work in outline form, press the "save" button and the contents get posted to your blog. To update your blogroll, you open it in the editor, type, link and save. It has nested categories which, again, you edit using the editor. Press "Build RSS" and it does.

It's OPML all the way through. E.g., the categories are an OPML file. Want to absorb someone else's taxonomy? Open up her OPML file. Want to merge feed subscription lists? Drag and drop. Reorder the way you want, as if it were an outliner...because it is an outliner. You can link an entry to another OPML file and it links in the appropriate content as if it were actually part of the document. E.g., You might link the "Florida" heading to an URL that has an OPML outline of towns in Florida. When you click on the "Florida" heading, you'll see the content of the outline of towns. [This makes it possible for an outline to contain multiple people's expertise. Very cool.]

It's Open Source. GPL. For Windows and Mac. Dave stresses that it's just an application on top of an outliner framework. On the server, the OPML is turned into HTML, and that's GPLed also. There are APIs that enable Dave's OPML editor to work with other blogging software.

Graphically it's very simple. At this point there are no numbers and sub numbers, no variation in typographic formatting to reflect hierarchical level, etc. But it's open source, so if you want it, build it.

Dave says that what's most important about this is that it's a tool for representing the relationship between pieces of information. Its openness and its ability to link in other outlines -- distributed nested knowledge -- makes this more than cool.