Share Your OPML, a new project founded by Dave Winer, is launching officially on Monday. It is a self-described “commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy.” It will gather a community of subscription lists and aggregate them in interesting and useful ways.
To participate, create an account and upload an OPML file containing the content feeds that you read. Most feed readers like Bloglines, NewsGator, Rojo, Attensa, etc. store the feeds that you read in the OPML file format and can be exported. The feeds that are included in your OPML file are aggregated with feeds other people have uploaded. If you don’t know what all this stuff means, don’t worry. You can still use the site to find new sources of content that you might like to read.
This aggregated data is useful. In particular, it will help people find new feeds that they may enjoy.
There’s a top 100 list of the most popular feeds which could become the definitive top 100 list once there is a statistically relevant number of users (subject to SYO successfully controlling spam). You can also see other users that have similar reading habits as you (it’s called “subscriptions like mine”). Based on this last feature, John Tropea, Robert Scoble and Dave Winer are my closest matches. I may find other interesting feeds by perusing their lists.
There are basic sharing options included now: a user can set sharing to off, which will keep his or her list private (but still include those feeds in the aggregated rankings. Dave Winer says that they’ll have per-feed sharing turned on within a few days.
Spam may become an issue with the site as people attempt to game the top 100 list. There are some controls in place now - a feed is only counted once even if it’s in an OPML file multiple times, and only once account can be created from a single email address. Dave has lots of experience dealing with spam from his days running the Weblogs.com ping server, so expect to see additional protective measures put in place as the service evolves.
If tools are added that make SYO the easiest place to manage your OPML (including adding feeds, removing feeds, batch operations, categorization/tagging, etc.), some of the more openminded RSS readers may start to allow customers to store their OPML at SYO instead of with the reader. SYO would become a sort of central registry of people’s OPML files.
Comments
Why is everyone so fixated on Top 100 lists? From Technorati to services like Memeorandum, people seem to focus on the popularity of blogs. This emphasis seems very much like the current maninstram media approach of measuring success by ratings. Top 100 lists will always miss the niches, the odd blogs, the blogs that cover some arcane topic in favor of blogs that cover topics that get attention and are of wide concern. There’s nothing wrong with the latter kind of blog, but they are not inherently better for being popular - yet top N lists imply that this is so.
Rick, this is just where we begin.
We’re totally looking for methods of recommending feeds based on your interests, not on the aggregate.
But I’m curious to see what we come up with for the overall Top 100, and other people certainly will be too.
If you have ideas for reports we should create, we’re definitely going to try out new ideas.
OPML file (while being a cool feature) are mostly used by the geek side.
The Top 100 will reflect this geekyness since it doesnt really take into account which feeds are the most consummed reader-base wise.
Otherwise said, this isn’t a Top 100 of the most popular RSS feeds.
Good to hear, Dave. My first comment was not directed at you specifically, but at the tendency for people to say how blogs change the game and then to measure blog success using old media methodogies and paradigms.
As to what I’d like to see… Well, at a basic level I’d like to see is some way to identify blogs by the topics that they cover and then by authority.
For example, a friend of mine is just discovering blogs. She’s interested in affordable housing - the politics, programs and research on what works and what doesn’t. Now, if Technorati is right that there are 19m regularly updated blogs, some of them likely cover this… yet it’s not easy to find them. Top N lists won’t bring these out, and they’ll never hit Memeorandum, Digg, Reddit or any other popularity driven list. Blog searches will find posts with the right keywords, but that doesn’t mean the blogs cover this topic regularly. Tagworld, etc might be better, but they too seem post oriented. What this is, of course, is a taxonomy issue - if I want to find blogs on a new topic, how can I efficiently do that? We could manually build a fixed taxonomy ala early Yahoo!, but I think those days are past and, anyway, look what happened to that approach. The thing is, my friend doesn’t really need to find 1000 or even 100 blogs on affordable housing - she just needs to find, say, 10 authoritative ones. From there, the reading lists on those blogs would likely give me enough other sites that, in a couple of iterations I would have a very good list. But finding the right 10 is tough using current mechanisms - if you can help crack that problem it would be VERY cool.
Anyway, this comment is long enough as is and I’ve gotta go put my OPML where my mouth is…
Holy 2 years ago Batman! Didn’t we do this already?!?
Francois, it will be possible to directly connect feed readers to SYO. The user simply checks off an option saying they want to share their data, and the exchange is handled by the software.
come on, where the hell is Gadgetopia?
After clicking around a bit I was able to find my list of feeds, but I haven’t found an easy way to get to that page. Am I missing something obvious?
Mr. Winer:
I agree with Francois in his comment, “OPML file (while being a cool feature) are mostly used by the geek side.”
OPML looks wonderful, but for those of us who are technologically inept and can just barely set up RSS feeds to make into email alerts, what is needed is way more public outreach of the “for dummies” variety.
For instance, I don’t yet understand the distinction between reading lists and regular OPML files. Aren’t they both automatically updated?
Also, I would love to be able to just bundle bunches of RSS feeds into tidy packages and dump them into various locations. I have seen Marshall Kirkpatrick do this with amazing fluidity. I have watched the very useful screencast by Alex Barnett here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn.....87592.aspx
but even that is a little advanced for those of us without know-how. Could you or someone on your staff put together an even more basic screencast and show, say, five uses of OPML? It is a wonderful technology and will be a huge boon to information-hungry people (like librarians). But there doesn’t seem to be anywhere where one can learn the very, very basics. The same goes for how to set up subject-specific feeds of other people’s feeds on one’s own site a la:
http://www.ia-blog.com/2006/05.....feeds.html
You geeky guys are wonderful people, very generous and skillful. You just need to talk down to us to the rest of us. We don’t mind. We’re not proud! We need help!
Thank you for anything you can do on this front.
Hope
Toby - no, you’re not missing anything. It’s a simple feature addition (viewing your OPML option when you are logged in) that I’m sure will be added.
Cool, I figured it was on the way.
Francois: of course it’s not a list of the most popular RSS feeds ever. Anyone claiming to have that data is fooling themselves.
What the site should do is clarify what the Top 100, and other related reports, actually provide: a readout of what’s popular in that community.
Also, what I see in this portal is similar to how Dave’s last OPML commons started. The people in the database, since it’s prelaunch, are presumably techies who were in on a beta or readers of this blog. Yes, it’s skewed right now; it’s a small population. It will change.
i think it is a brilliant idea that will be useful for users to discover smartly new blogs and that will help professionals complete the usual macro-stats blog panorama (Technorati, Memeorandum,…). And to be honest i was thinking about implementing that idea myself. Well done Dave
Comment #7 above was exactly right. We did do this already. Heck, DAVE did this already. Early last year. I only remember it because I blogged it:
http://full-speed.org/archives.....r_opml.php
Didn’t Dave do this already on userland.com or scripting.com or something in the past? What’s new here?
This is really awesome! I think it will truly help uncover newer interesting feeds from peers as well as from the top listings. Looking forward to using it.
You know what I wanna see on this? Realtime sync with popular feedreaders.
Apart form the top listings - which to be honest looks self-fufilling - I like the idea of finding subscription listings that match my own. A good way to discover other folk outside the usual suspects.
Especially useful for niche topics.
This post is directed to rick gregory’s comments but serves as a general, useful trendspotting.
Actually there is no feed reader who “DeepFeeds”. Like deep linking, this phenomenon can be seen as looking deep under feeds, say by . Such a thing can solve the problem your friend is having.
Dave,
I respect what you have done with RSS and OPML. However, I have to agree with Francois, OPML is beyond the grasp of mainstream Internet users. As RSS readers become popular on more devices (cell phones), I feel OPML will become an inconvenient method for transferring reading lists. I enjoyed poking around SYO and look forward to seeing future iterations. I have no doubt the more tech savvy demographic will embrace it.
Michael,
I would appreciate the opportunity to run you through a demo of cobundle. While it is a direct competitor with SYO, we have taken an entirely different approach. Please contact me…it has a lot of rounded corners!
The key here will be to create a good recommendation engine (RE), one that is based on topics rather than other people subscribing to those feeds.
Earlier on somebody talked about how their friend is interested in affordable housing, politics, etc. they are just starting out so the problem is that they don’t have anything to seed the RE with - and no RE will point her to some cool small student housing blog if she is subscribed to 15 politics blogs that are all in the T100.
I have tested out a few RE’s, this one is ok but needs more mass. Loomia is good, and always getting better. This is something I would like memeorandum or Aggregate Knowledge release (as an API).
What is good about Share Your OPML is that it is open - bloglines and feedburner have all of this information but they are not willing to share it. It would be great to have a report on which blogs are hot and other info come from these services.
The pool of subscription information that Share Your OPML will eventuall build up can also be very effective in fighting spam. I am sure that because Dave is behind this that we will see an effective API released so that we can all use this pool.
Personnaly I don’t really get it. I prefer much more something like atiki.com where you share “mini” opmls, that deal with a single subject. My ompl has blogs about tech, web2.0, cooking, politics etc. I don’t see why it’s interesting to share that. It’s much better to share thematic opmls as you can do with atiki (for instance)…
I would love to see top 100 Quality Blogs in different areas - based on quality and NOT nessecary popularity… Since when did popularity become a measurement for quality? Me personally? I love OPML - I take it everyday…
For the general non-nerd public - I would suggest to change the name from OPML to something that is easier to understand like bundled content (not a very good name, but I am sure that somebody else will come up with a better name).
Like many - what is new about this? “it will help people find new feeds that they may enjoy” - how? Sadly I think it will simply reinforce the digerati top 100 as followed by TechMeme, Technorati and others. Oh look TechCrunch is number 1, Scoble,Om Malik, Steve Gillmor etc. Nothing new here then!
What is needed is a personal discovery engine that is based on your interests combined with a trusted list of friends and or experts that provides you with a “reading list” of new things which can be further filtered by a particular topic area.
I am currently working on a project called “Liquid Lists” that does this and it will be launching at Content 2.0 in London on 6th June. I hope to show Mike Arrington next week when he is over in London. So now you can share your attention and opml with others and then select other peoples opml or attention by adding them into your trusted list. In doing so your reading list changes based on the people you actively subscribe too - i.e your blogroll actually has value.
In addition why should I send Dave my opml. It has value as proved by Seth Goldsteins Root Vault project. Are you going to pay me for my OPML/Attention Dave? Marketing and Advertisers want this data and it has value according to Steve Rubel. With Liquid Lists we have created a model similar to adsense where we pay you for your OPML/Attention by sharing the adrevenue. Bottom-line your OPML is value you have created over time - why shouldn’t you benefit from it both in terms of discovery and value.
Why is everyone going on about the Top 100? The point is that once you’ve uploaded your file, you can find people who’ve got similar tastes to you, and to find out who reads what.
If you want to remove feeds from an OPML file before you upload it, you might want to check out this little Editor hack I’ve put together:
http://blogs.opml.org/tommorri.....reYourOpml
Hi. I am using Netvibes, and still can’t find how do i create an OPML file from my feeds. However, if Netvibes can write an API for this site, it will be great. I will be able to send my RSS feeds directly from the site, and also find like minded people.
Sounds interesting, but it’ll take me a while to pick through my OPML and make it just right before uploading, hehe. I can see this becoming one more semi-important list to look at to find useful feeds and to know who’s paying attention to what, but I don’t know how “Share Your OPML” could become the one-stop shop for my attention.
After reading, I still have no idea what on earth is OPML. How useful is it?
Over the last couple of weeks I have ’stumbled’ onto literally hundreds of blogs I would like to be reading (Techcrunch was one and I have added it to one of my newscreens). Some of them have blogrolls with dozens and dozens more that the authors find useful and that I might also. My problem is that if I were to read everything, ignoring for a second that I don’t have a blazing connection, I would be spending more than the 2 hours a day I spend now on reading feeds.
Rick Gregory is right, we need a way to get an expert opinion on which blogs to read on topics we are interested in. I think SYO just creates another list too large and too general to be useful in that regard.
I like my solution, but then I am biased.
Tracy, Editor in Chief,
Dailyblognews.net
I already share my OPML from my website, what does this service give me over and above that?
Ciaran’s OPML
Toby & Mike -
We’ve gone ahead and added a link to the sidebar that will take you right to your list of feeds. It’s called View My Shared Feeds.
We also added a basic preferences page so you can change your name and/or password, if need be.
–
Dan MacTough
Sam,
I agree a personal discovery engine for content feeds is needed.
However, I do not agree that an individual’s OPML file has a monetary value. Maybe Michael or Nik’s blog roll has monetary value, but I think very few users fall into that category.
The value a user obtains for uploading their OPML file is the personal discovery engine. Even users like Michael and Nik can benefit from being introduced to “edge” content feeds they were unaware of.
Ari, I agree. The value is in the aggregation of these lists, and then doing interesting things with that aggregated data.
The problem with most feed search engines is that they treat every feed equally. The OPML data will be very helpful in sorting and judging these feeds. Great idea!
is there a way to convert my html bookmarks into opml?
I tried posting the following to the Yahoo!360 mailing list without success (post was confirmed but I don’t seem my comments). Here goes:
Am I missing something here? Why doesn’t this Data Space offer an OPML feed that aggregates the RSS links culled from the OPML content contributions of its membership?
I was expecting to be able to search this Data Space / Service (at least using Free Text) over HTTP, but I am restricted to a set of canned searches offered by the system. Even so, why isn’t there a subscription gem beside each of these canned queries? There could be one OPML for each query.
Why doesn’t this system have the ability to consume OPML feed URLs? At the current time you are limited to file uploads.
I hope to receive some clarification re. my observations in due course. This Directory style Data Space could be a little more useful if it offered a tad more flexibility
The main thing I think that needs to happen is for vendors to ship APIs for OPML export.
The big online RSS aggregators (Newsgator, Bloglines, FeedLounge) have these. The other guys don’t right now. This just makes sharing OPML that much harder.
Maybe Dave would be willing to help meput pressure on these vendors to do the right thing and ship an API.
Tailrank has the same data and possibly from more users.
I don’t think these would be anywhere near represent real world blog readership. RSS readers do not mirror real world blog readership.
Kevin
Dave:
“We’re totally looking for methods of recommending feeds based on your interests, not on the aggregate.”
Tailrank already does this. Create an account, upload your OPML, then click on filter and click on suggest.
Or you can just go to:
http://tailrank.com/recommend
If you’ve already uploaded your OPML…
You can also share this.
http://tailrank.com/recommend/handle/burtonator
Will show you my recommended feeds via our ranking algorithm.
We also have a top 100 list of weblogs. Its not exposed right now but if there’s interest I might push it out again in a future release.
We also have APIs for all of this stuff so if anyone wants to mash all this up let me know. I just need to get documentation done.
Kevin
“Why doesn’t this system have the ability to consume OPML feed URLs? At the current time you are limited to file uploads.”
No, it does have said ability.
why can’t I open the site? It kept giving me error messages from WP: “Error establishing a database connection”.
Tom,
I see that it doesn accept OPML file URLs (which could be made a little more obvious
). Anyway, this URL fails: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog.....l.xml?:c=1
When will people learn that you can’t do anything in RSS and OPML without Kevin Burton having done it first?
I really like the simplicity of Share OPML, and it works really well with Feedlinx. (http://www.feedlinx.com)
I’m supporting Share OPML in full force, with new ideas every day.
*If your current reader doesn’t support a dynamic, online feed, Feedlinx can provide you with one. Personally, I use SharpReader with Feedlinx and Share OPML, but Feedlinx is reader agnostic.
*If you’d like to share some of your feeds with Share OPML, while hiding others, Feedlinx can do that for you too.
Feedlinx manages the individual feeds in a centralized place and helps Share OPML do its job as the OPML aggregator.
Hey Hope — if you simply think of OPML as a way to organize and share lists, it might not seem so geek-only.
fwiw, here’s the SYO Top 100 in my web-app, Bitty Browser. So, as one somewhat self-serving example, you can browse the feeds from within personal desktops like Google and Netvibes, or share them from your own site / blog.
-Scott
Our OPML Feed
http://www.allworldautomotive.com/rss_feeds.opml
Interesting site http://portaldiscount.com/navy.....dit-union/
OPML generator http://feed2opml.com
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