[ba-ohs-talk] Instant Outlining
Jon Udell's article on Instant outlining, at
http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a//webservices/2002/04/01/outlining.html
deserves attention. (01)
Instant Outlining is a technology being developed, and used, by Dave
Winer's Radio Userland group. It allows people to subscribe to each
others' outlines. Instant outlining: (02)
- is like Instant Messaging, in that nodes (messages) can be shared with
buddies subscribing to them;
- is like e-mail, in that persistent messages are shared between people;
- and is like blogging, in that you get a narrative of ideas. (03)
From the article:
> Outlines are hierarchies of nodes containing text. Your own outline is
> editable; others are viewable and navigable. As an outline writer, you
> can assign two kinds of links to a node: normal Web hyperlinks and OPML
> links. The picture shows an example of each. The link labeled (1) is a
> hyperlink which, when clicked, opens in a browser.
>
> The link labeled (2), which refers to an OPML file, does something new
> and exciting. It opens in situ , expanding within the current context
> of the outline. Transcluding content in this way is a long-overdue
> feature of the Web. What's especially stunning, though, is that the
> feature is here woven into an authoring tool that aims to replace email
> as the primary mode of communication in closely-knit collaborative
> teams. (04)
[OPML = Outline Processor Markup Language] (05)
This also is XML-based. It goes along with the REST URI-centric
approach, letting you easily create (write the web) nodes, which have
URI's, and which can be privately or publicly published and subscribed
to. (06)
Both outlines and blogs tend to be linear, so they share the same larger
problem (with e-mail and newsgroups) of how to sediment information
streams (which are usually temporal) into more topic-oriented, and
concise (in practice, edited), structures. I think Touchgraph/Tinderbox
directed graphs have more potential in this regard than outlines, but
the proof is in the handy, usable apps! (07)
Cheers,
Mark (08)