Tag: OSCOM

fixing opml, or bootstrapping?

danny ayers asks what i think of oml, an attempt to fix opml.
i would agree that opml is not the best format ever, but its what we have to work with imo. i have seen many attempts to fix opml, but i’m personally more interested in leveraging formats than creating new ones. if you have to extend opml, i would personally go for namespaces, and not just add arbitrary elements. kinda the rss 2.0 approach.

danny is working on ideagraph, a mindmap meets outliner meets semantic web application. it supports weblogs, rdf, foaf and a couple other niceties. very cool. danny should definitely attend oscom 3.

leverage each other

An experiment in Ridiculously Easy Group Forming, if you are going to OSCOM, simply trackback, pingback, link to (assuming you have full content in your rss and an rss autodiscovery link tag in your weblog), email, or simply comment on this weblog entry.
By using trackback, pingback, or simply linking, you are helping spread the word about this weblog entry, and hopefully others who are going will then see it and do likewise.
Then check back periodically (or subscribe to this comment’s rss feed) to see who else is going.

very nice idea. it has been my goal for this conference to make it interactive, and let people schmooze even before the first day of the conference. meeting people is such a central element of any conference, and blogs can greatly increase the value for the conference goer.

design reuse

being open source is not enough. for a small startup like wyona, it is important to grow a community around our project. apache lenya is standards-driven, probably more so then most content management systems. but why stop at the plumbing level? for all users care, having your data in xml and your framework open source doesn’t give them immediate benefits.
this is where reuse at the site level comes in. real problems are not solved by frameworks per se, but rather with concrete uses of the framework on a real site. we therefore encourage the sharing of and collaboration on complete sites, with navigation, information architecture, workflows..
in due time, it should be possible to capture best practice in sample publications, and thus distribute improvements to these default publications to all our customers.

Getting results

Dave has started work on the keynote for OSCOM 3:

I accepted the keynote offer because I wanted to see if we could get some work done. I’d like to open a discussion about that. Should we find a common module that we could implement across all CMSes, whether they be commercial or open source? I know I’d love to see a Yahoo-like OPML browser in all CMS’s. We already have one in Manila and in Radio.

Getting work done is the spirit we want, too. Maybe practical interop with twingle could be something to build on? Add OPML to the mix, and you got a powerful feature set.

the wall

America’s oldest university has hopped on the Internet’s hottest new trend, hiring software developer Dave Winer to help get students and faculty blogging.

lets hope other universities get a clue too. harvards influence will make sure that many who would otherwise dismiss the topic are now exposed to blogs. i wonder when zurich university will bite. there are lots of walls to tear down for sure.

The Jamaica Digital Divide

i couldn’t keep my mouth shut, and now i’m the driving force behind a project to build a web-based music / articles management system for the government of jamaica. through the network of charlie, OSCOM was asked to do an amalgamation of our various systems with harvard tools, get a nice unified interface, and finally jet over there to instruct the locals how to use it. as is often the case with my ventures, this one is quite iffy too. for starters, it’s not clear whether the government officials in charge will still be in power after the next elections, we haven’t heard their precise requirements yet, it’s not clear who will be involved and in what role etc. although to be honest, i think clear-cut projects are boring.