Jon Udell writes a quick recap of outlining on the web and overview of Dave Winer’s OPML Editor.

I’ve been trying it out today (the editor); I’ve actually been waiting for it for a while - I was playing with the idea of extending the OPML Tools Sourceforge Project started by Philip Pearson and Matt Grayson, and did a little work on it but left it behind for more pressing matters. Once I saw that Dave was working on an editor I decided to wait and see what he came up with before pressing onward with my work (assuming I ever get back to it).

After all that waiting, I find that I’m still waiting. Dave’s current offering is beta, and he’s offered a great deal of functionality, but it’s not quite to where I’d like to see an OPML editor be. I expect that Dave will be updating the code regularly for a while and I’m highly interested in further developments. Most of my current complaints have more to do with user interface bugs that I imagine Dave will fix when he gets around to them.

Back to Jon’s post; he positted an aspect of the OPML experience that I hadn’t considered - the usage for collaboration. In retrospect it’s obvious; what are OPML outlines but remixable text. Jon indicates that some user moght be surprized to find that transcluded outlines are read only, but in my mind that matches Dave’s overt concern with publishers’ rights.

I haven’t explored the blogging portion of the software yet, and in order to do so I’d have to find some content of interest (at least to me) that I would publish there. I don’t produce enough right now to support the 2 blogs I currently run, and past experience with Yahoo! 360° and the like indicates that I won;t use another blogging tool than the 2 I already publish on. Perhaps there’s some kind of mini-content (not to be confused with >a href=”http://microformat.org” title=”microformtas and microcontent”>microcontent I can try it out with. Jon also mentions activeRenderer, a tool that I’ve used to help display html versions of the OPML content at my other site.