nobody reads this …
By popular demand, you can now browse/graze and listen to all the podcasts aggregated by NPR (National Public Radio) by visiting http://npr.podcast.com
Soon we’ll have the tools to be able to provide custom content at the ‘home’ level of *any* of the nodes/branches – making these cool subdomains even cooler!
I just saw the Dave has pointed to a post from Chis Pirillo, asking for an OPML file of all of NPR’s podcasts. Funnily enough, I have been talking to people at NPR about doing just that.
I have an OPML file here, which lists all their podcasts.
Very soon (once I have ironed out a bug) I will use the alpha system at podcast.com to publish this. All I need to do is import the OPML, and then assign a subdomain, using the simple form (yet to be released) and bingo!! They’ll all appear within npr.podcast.com I did an identical process to create http://bbc.podcast.com
While reading this article on creating a more tasteful MySpace page, it occurs to me that all these social networks online provide so much aggragate data on an individual and his or her habits and influences that it seems to me that electronic ID tagging and profiling of everyone (the kind that gets everyone all hot and sweaty when governments suggest their introduction) is already upon us. And it raises millions.
Interesting story here (CNN via AmyLoo) that shows a person's blog led the police to find a dead body in his bedroom cupboard.
The future is certainly going to be interesting with respect to our identities and profiles – and the multitude of ways that people can (already) feed, splice, dice, mix and mash that data through all sorts of interesting algorithms.
Well done Niall Kennedy on his move to Microsoft, to work on the feed syndications elements of Live.com
At least we know they have someone there who really knows their stuff. Cool!
I just got round to having a good read of the two patents out there linked by Adam Green regarding feeds and aggregators and auto-discovery of feeds in a web page.
All this would be a huge fly in the ointment for just about every feed aggregator, feed parser, feed browser/grazer out there!! WTF?
I cant tell if these filings (one from Apples' Steven Jobs) have been accepted and processed yet, but buy, this could pose all sorts of problems.
OPML is not mentioned, per se, but there are so many methods of collecting and presenting feeds mentioned here, that various problems could arise, I think.
Has anyone else seen any further discussion and dissection of these patents? If so, could you let me know, as it could put the kibosh on a few things that many of us are working on.
This is a webcast of Sir Tim in Oxford recently (we were supposed to be going – but ultimately coudn't make it) talking about the Future of The Web.
Abstract:
The development of Web technology has
been an exciting ride, a series of socially motivated technical
innovations some languishing, others catching on in a viral way. As
each development has suggested many new ones, and much of the original
vision is still unfulfilled, there is a lot to do. This talk will
discuss new challenges and hopes for weblike systems on the net.
Google Reader’s ‘feed-splicing’. Why don’t they call it a Reading List anywhere? Nice though, that they have a JavaScript snippet to be able to pump a mini-rivulet through your blog template – mmm : expect to see alot more of this soon. Microformats.
Cool! I just got something I think is pretty cool working here. Based on a blogging system I started a long time ago – which I then just used to store links (pre del.icio.us) [we use them and their simple urls on the Bluggcast – as simple urls are easier to say on a podcast than the whole kaboodle] – I have been looking at building a calendar to browse the links (or blog/podcast posts if I switch a database table – as they both work the same way). Archive lists are OK on blogs, but I rather like calendars.
I mulled over the idea of whether if was worth learning to build a calendar and eventually decided it was. And boy, was it. At least three other applications for it just appeared out of thin air. Not only that, but as I had first created it in HTML, with higlighted days of activity and the like, I was then able to reeeeally easily evolve that script again to provide the data sets back and forth to a Flash interface, using OPML! Hurrah for OPML! The whole client takes OPML. It eats OPML for breakfast.
THEREFORE, ladies and gentlemen, an(other) API contender has emerged too. Double-hurrah! OPML based too. As Herr Viner vould say: bingk!
Time based feed grazing anyone? 😉
Dave’s been pointing a guy called Phil Jones recently. He has some interesting ideas and clearly thinks alot about stuff. He’s a professor. Probably paid to. Cool! Today Dave posted a response to some of the points Phil has been raising.
One snippet here caught my eye:
I think DMOZ and Yahoo’s directories are the wrong model, that this all needs to be opened up. There’s no single home page on the web, so why should there be a single home page for the global directory. Let a billion flowers bloom. May the best root win. May there be as many roots as there are points of view.
I have built many systems in the past based on made-up bespoke xml formats which I created to do what I needed an app to do – this for example, uses ‘OPML’ and ‘RSS’ (and time events), but none of it actually IS OPML or RSS. But they would have done the trick in retrospect. As would a load of other formats : SMIL, etc.
SMIL gets me thinking about the multimedia systems on the web I have always envisioned (I wrote and sold a SMIL based multi-user publishing system call Smibase a few years back – that’s how I ended up at the Beeb). MPEG4 does this too, or will more once we see more tools to ‘orchestrate’ content. Quicktime also has huge untapped power as a multimedia application wrapper – did you know you can embed Flash inside Quicktime and have the QT ‘talk’ back and forth to the Flash ‘track’? You can. It’s pretty cool. BUT the tools out there to manipulate such formats are few and far between. LiveStagePro was one I used a few years ago to come up with a solution to put up-to-date news on massive screens in UK railway stations. I ended up going back to Director10 (which I hadn’t used since version 4!!) and built it in Lingo, with a WYSIWYG Flash based back end.
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s all these great formats out ALREADY. But people will keep reinventing the wheel and trying to come up with new formats, when I think what we should be doing is building TOOLS to test/evolve/bolster/work the formats we already have. I’m usually pleasantly surprised when I do that. But I admit to ‘making stuff up’ if I can’t find things or am pushed to find a solution (which I know can be fixed later on by someone who rally knows that part of the system – if need be)
And about ‘winning’: Dave and I once had a chat where the subject of ‘heroes’ came up. I think Dave would like to be ‘a hero’ of sorts. And to many he is. My take on it is that you don’t need to be the winner to be the hero or the ‘legend’.
It’s about hearts. Not prizes. They last longer (we pray).
This caught my eye (on a branch on treedia. heh). Something called FeedBlitz has added OPML support. Now, I’m sure this has plenty of uses for those odd people who decide to fill up their email inboxes with link emails and subscriptions, but to me, these kinds of services are (to me) what this whole thing is all about. It’s about keeping STUFF OUT of your inbox!!
Aggregators, grazers, whatever you want to call them, help you do that. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that there are some good reasons for subbing to a mailing list these days – but it’s very ‘0.5 – 1.0’ activity if you ask me) OPML can play a great part in helping the organization and taxnomy that we all find so comforting. 😉