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Radio Userland product manager Steve Kirks proposes a new nickname for this weeks geek topic, OPML Reading Lists. I know lots of people hate OPML because Dave Winer thought of it, but I like it (Id love to see a real outliner for windoze that used it) and I like the idea of a standard way of publishing reading lists.
OPML reading lists (an OPML file containing links to selected XML syndication feeds) are the hot topic this month and personally, I'm tired of typing all of those letters. So, in the grandest tradition of the blogosphere, let's find a good way to shorten those words. I'm proposing ORL pronounced "oral". Usage: Person A: "I need new stuff to read. Got any recommendations?" Person B: "Download this "orl" file into your aggregator?" Person A: "What's an aggregator?" Person B: "<SIGH>" ORL isn't the prettiest name, but if I pick something, someone else might make a better stab at it. I'm going to start tagging these types of post with ORL, too.
Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon/TypeStyle/NewsGator fame explains a little more what ORL is about:
In a nutshell, the idea is that you'd subscribe to an OPML document which contains a list of feeds that someone is reading, some organization is recommending, or some service has generated (such as "Top 100" list). Changes to the source OPML document would be synchronized, so that you're automatically subscribed to feeds added to the reading list. Likewise, you'd be unsubscribed from feeds removed from the original OPML. Then I read where the indomitable Judith Meskill at the Social Software Weblog has finally, unbelievably, indisputably had enough of entering all her stuff into all these different services (I actually felt this way the second time I did it. Judith must have done it hundreds of times.)
 I caught a glimpse of Swagroll last week and saw it again on Emily Changs excellent eHub list of Web 2.0 apps and figured Id mention it here. Why didnt I mention it last week? Well... Im of the same mind as Stowe Boyd -why do I feel like Im doing a lot of work Ive already done elsewhere? Add books, music, movies, and more to your own swagroll - my god, do I have to? Again? Didnt we do this already with Delicious Monster? Havent I done this in iTunes? Havent I done this on Amazon? On All Consuming? On Netflix? I have zero desire to do any of it all over again. Zero. [...] So I have to ask, isn't there a path here for ORL to capture a "lifestream" that populates all these things and just fills them in as we hop from one container service to another? Now, I know we have FOAF and LOAF and RDF and BFD and whatever, but theyre all so freakin complicated I cant deal with them. OPML I get maybe because it gets rendered as a human-readable outline but I get it. I dont know how this stuff works so maybe its all just so-o-o-o-o-o much more complicated than someone like me can grasp. But Id be happy for people to tell me why ORL cant begin to do what Ive described.
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