The Berkeley Blog

Dave Winer's OPML roadshow comes to the Berkeley CyberSalon

Note: if you are interested in a more stenographic account of what happened at Dave Winer's OPML Roadshow at the Berkeley Cybersalon, see http://blogs.opml.org/geodog/2005/08/20.

I think in outlines, and I love the idea of outliners, but the implementation has not lived up to the promise. I think that I have tried them all, at least all the ones that run on Windows (I hear that there is a great outliner for the Mac, OmniOutliner). My favorite single pane outliner is TKoutline, but it doesn't handle large documents very well, and hasn't been updated in over a year. My favorite multipane outliner is Keynote, but it doesn't really understand HTML, stores its data in a non-standard format, and it too isn't under active development. The best multipurpose outliner, and the one I use the most is EccoPro, a piece of software that has an avid following, but it hasn't been updated since 1997, and doesn't know anything about XML or OPML and also doesn't deal well with the web. There has been an announcement on the intention to open source ECCOPRO, but little news since then. I don't know of any good outliners currently being developed on Windows (suggestions always welcome). So when I heard a few weeks ago that Dave Winer had released an OPML editor, I downloaded it and tried it. On my Windows 2000 laptop it crashed when I tried to start it up. I tried it on my Windows XP laptop and it ran, but I couldn't figure out how to do the first task I tried to do with it, which was to edit the urls of some of the RSS feeds in the OPML files I keep my RSS subscriptions in. It was all too reminiscent of my experiences with Dave Winer's Radio Userland, full of promise and interesting ideas, but with a UI that wasn't intuitive and riddled with bugs. So I deleted the software from my hard drive and went back to EccoPro. However, when I heard that Dave Winer was coming to Berkeley to evangelize for his new product, I decided to give it and him another chance.

Dave Winer is an interesting and often infuriating character. I spent some time in his vicinity in the early 2000's, and used the product he created, Radio Userland, for my second weblog for a while before abandoning it in fury. Dave reminded me of the really smart and competitive kid in junior high who sat in the front, had always done all the reading, always had his hand up eager to either show off his knowledge or ask some obscure question that didn't interest anyone else, and went into a frenzy if the teacher didn't pay attention to him. I knew kids like this in school, I may have even been a little like that myself, but we grew up. When I first met Dave at Supernova, and in my interactions afterwards, he gave the impression of still being there in the front row, competing for attention, and sulking (or worse) if he didn't get all of it. He became famous in the tech world for lashing out at people semi-randomly, but having a very thin skin himself, and being unable to take criticism. It is amazing that anyone paid attention to what he had to say -- if it wasn't for the fact that he was smart, and had some visionary ideas, even if they weren't as visionary or unique as he would want people to believe, nobody would have. Well, if tonight is any indicator, he seems to have finally grown up and mellowed out a bit, and his personality is no longer such a huge obstacle to getting his ideas across. And, he still has some very interesting ideas, even if his implementation of them still leaves a lot to be desired.

The Hillside Club is a beautiful old building and club a few blocks from my house in Berkeley that is being revived by the efforts Sylvia Paull, Jeff Ubois, Nina Davis and others, and is where the Berkeley Cybersalon meets on a semi-monthly basis. Tonight it was jammed with local and not so local tech and media luminaries, all to hear Dave Winer explain OPML and demo his product. The Berkeley / East Bay contingent included Tim Ayers and Wes Boyd from MoveOn, Phil Wolff of Skype Journal, Lance Knobel, Scott Rosenberg of Salon (fellow ECCOPRO devotee), Tom Hunt of Berkeley Internet Systems, Andreas Knuth, the locally resident West Coast correspondent of the Economist, and many more whom I didn't recognize. The bridge and tunnel people coming to the center of the universe here in Bezerkely included Dan Farber, Steve Gillmor (funny idea of a vacation, Steve), Alison Fish, and Steve Rhodes, and there was even an contingent from Redmond, the ubiquitous Robert Scoble, the man who makes Microsoft seem human, and Microsoft's CTO, Ray Ozzie, inventor of Motes and Groove. Wonder what the folks from Redmond were doing at a Berkeley Cybersalon? And that's just the people I know or recognized from conferences. No matter what you think of Dave Winer or OPML, as a Berkeley resident who likes also working in Berkeley, it is nice to see Berkeley getting a little bit of mindshare from the digerati. Past reviews on The Berkeley Blog notwithstanding, I am grateful to Jeff Ubois and Sylvia Paull for putting on the Berkeley Cybersalon and enriching life in Berkeley.

Before going to tonight's event, I went to the OPML.org, and downloaded a new version of Dave Winer's OPML editor onto my XP Laptop, where it behaved. I blogged Dave's "roadshow" live, publishing my notes using his OPML editor at 10 minutes intervals as the evening progressed. If you want to read my notes of the evening as written with Dave's OPML editor, see http://blogs.opml.org/geodog/2005/08/20. As I wrote at the end of the experience, I hate liveblogging, because you miss stuff, plus my lack of ability to spell is revealed to the world. But it is fun to try occasionally. In general I prefer to write analysis, commentary, invective, or reporting with time to edit, and this piece is a little of all of the above.

So what did Dave demo? Dave showed a single pane outliner, with a vanilla UI, that allows you to create multi-level lists. Nothing very interesting about that. The power comes from two additional features that he demonstrated, and the fact that he has created a data format to enable both. First, the outliner is also a publishing tool -- when the user clicks the Save button, the outline is published to the web. Second, the outliner enables you to incorporate other people's outlines and changes to outlines in near real time. As he demoed, you can subscribe to other people's outlines, and get near-instantaneous updates to your own outline when the people change the outlines you have subscribed to. Very powerful concepts. The funny thing is that, as probably only power Radio users or outliner geeks realized, both of these capabilities were present in Radio, in rudimentary form, but they were obscured by its marketing as a blog tool. Now Dave has made the outlining primary, and the blogging secondary.

What were my takeaways from Dave's OPML roadshow?




I like the new Dave better Dave has mellowed, and changed in some very agreeable ways. Not that he has visibly achieved satori and become egoless, but his calls for community, open sourcing the code under the GPL, and stated willingness to cede control were are all music to my ears. How often do you hear "I've made enough money?" The proof, of course, will be in the acts, but it seems a like a good start.

OPML, or its successors, will be rapidly adopted as a format for exchanging structured data and collaboration. There is a crying need for a lightweight format for exchanging lightly structured information, and OPML, for all the problems with its spec, seems to solve a lot of real world problems and be gaining traction as a standard. It is the defacto standard for maintaining lists of RSS feeds, is becoming the defacto standard for blogrolls, and Dave Winer has shown what it is capable of being used for enabling collaboration. Dave demo'd an implementation of loosely coupled collaboration using OPML and Tom Abate of the San Francisco Chronicle literally jumped out of his chair with excitement when the implications for collaboration of being able to subscribe to and include an outline (and the full text) of someone else's work, and have it dynamically update as the remote person updated their outline, became clear to him. While I would hope it doesn't happen, I wouldn't be surprised to see a new version of the RSS wars erupt with OPML, OML, Attention XML and others competing to be the standard, but at the end of the day I would expect the same result as has happened with the RSS wars -- several viable standards that developers have to support simultaneously and make interoperate, but the differences between the standards largely being opaque to the end user.

Like Moses, Dave will help point the direction towards the promised land, but others will enter it and make the commercially successful products. My experience to date with Dave's products validates his famous essay on software quality. They are buggy, and the user interface feels clumsy at best, and opaque at worst. After liveblogging the OPML roadshow with the OPML editor, I chose to write this post in a text editor, NoteTab, because it is a lot easier and faster for me than Dave's editor. However, unlike many other people with theories about what the future of software should be, Dave has working code that shows what his vision is. He can demonstrate his vision, and it is a compelling one of tools and formats designed for easy collaboration, exchange and publishing of information. Plus outlining for outline geeks like me. And unlike past efforts, this time he has enabled people to take his ideas and his code and run with them. Will people do interesting experiments with it? Yes. Will the next killer app be derived from the frontier/OPML editor code base? I doubt it. Will other people take his ideas, mix them with their own and re-implement the ideas using their own code base/architecture? I think the presence in the audience of Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie, the architect of the two most successful general purpose work collaboration environments, Notes and Groove, answers that question.

Cross-posted at Geodog

Note: The morning after posting this, I noticed that somehow I had forgotten to include the paragraph where I describe what Dave demo'ed, the one starting with "So what did Dave demo?". Doh! This post has been updated to add the paragraph back in.

Posted by Geodog at August 21, 2005 03:28 AM | TrackBack