Gnomedexers gather around RSS

I am in Seattle at Gnomedex 5.0, a gathering of the blogospherati, exploring everything from RSS and citizen journalism to podcasting and the future of media. One of the first day highlights was Microsoft public revelation of its Longhorn and IE 7.0 RSS strategy, which Matt Mullenweg (founding Word Press developer and fellow CNETer) said sounded much like Apple's Safari. My partner David Berlind has chapter and verse for the MS RSS announcement in his blog posting and podcast. The crowd at Gnomedex mostly liked what they heard, including RSS pioneer and outspoken RSS evangelist, developer and blogger Dave Winer and Creative Commons advocate Larry Lessig, who appeared via a pre-taped video.

Dean Hachamovitch, GM for Internet Explorer development at Microsoft rolls out RSS for Longhorn at Gnomedex

Winer also debuted his OPML Editor, which was a big hit with the crowd. I've known Dave since the 1980's when he pioneered outlining applications and then went on to create scripting tools and content management software. But his most influential contributions have come in authoring or co-author key technologies including SOAP 1.1, XML-RPC, RSS. The OPML Editor is his latest interation of Dave's lifelong relationship with outlining--Think Tank for the PC shipped in 1984, and MORE shipped in August of 1987. We joked that OPML Editor is the 85th version of MORE.

Here's how Dave describes his new OPML Editor.
 

The OPML Editor is good for all kinds of lists, directories, project planning, designs. The tool can be used by professionals and managers, doctors, professors, lawyers, accountants, writers -- basically anyone who thinks for a living.

Another way of looking at it -- RSS is great for news, but not everything is news, some things, like the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or the elements of the periodic table, don't change. Or change slowly, like the teams in major league baseball, or the top home run hitters. For information like that, knowledge, representing the relationships between nuggets is what's important, and that's where outliners like the OPML Editor, that's now in beta, excel.