Here's another Spaces feature post. Seems some bloggers on the bleeding edge are in love with OPML. I'm too dense to be a programmer, so it takes me a bit to figure out that OPML is Outline Processor Markup Language. I dig into Wikipedia on this and find out that's an XML format language for outlines. It was originally built as a native format for an outliner application, but since then has morphed into its present form, which has great applicability to RSS feeds. Hey, we're blogging now.

 

That's all great defiition stuff, but it didn't get me to the real reasons blognoids want this format all of a sudden. Fortunately, I found a post on Robert Scoble's blog Scobleizer that really spells out the potential benefits of an OPML feature set in any blog publishing tool. Hope the Spaces guys are paying attention. Only barely applies to my stuff to date since I only just started. But give me a year, and it'll be like gold.

 

Also seems to be some contention that OPML is a bad format. This further seems based on various OPML implementations not interoperating so well in the recent past. I'm not a programmer, and I just got involved in this thing, so there's no opinion coming from me yet. But the feature list that Scoble put out seems appealing to me whether it's based on OPML or something else. Hope the Spaces folks are at least listening to that.

 

I'l post more on OPML soon as I get my head into it.