July 14, 2005
The Community Directory

A post by Dave Winer that is timely, since he is releasing his OPML editor. I saw a demo of it two nights ago, and was impressed again by the potential of OPML. I'm one of the people he refers to who have been hand-coding their node (mine is the Travel category) of the ipodder.org community directory, an early experiment in a community run, distributed structure based on OPML. If I can do it, anyone can. But the ease and elegance of the new editor application is an impressive sign of new things on the horizon.

www.podcatch.com : The community directory

An excerpt:

The podcasting community did more than bootstrap a new medium in record time. As if that wasn't enough, it also bootstrapped a directory of podcasting resources and podcasts themselves, and a way of doing directories in communities that goes way beyond podcasting in importance. It's a structure of interlinked OPML directories, maintained by the community, linked together by the architecture of OPML. It's the small pieces loosely joined philosophy applied to directories, and it works. There is no official top level of the directory, but many people think of Adam Curry's ipodder.org directory as the top level. For many months Adam toiled over this directory, using an early version of the OPML Editor that I created for him. Many of the people who create directories that Adam links to actually code the OPML by hand, that's how dedicated and visionary these people are.

Posted by Dave at July 14, 2005 08:46 AM