Dave Winer, a key player in the development of RSS, podcasting, OPML and goodness only knows what else, released yesterday a very interesting new service called Share Your OPML. OPML, or Outline Processor Markup Language, is simpler than it might seem. It’s a format for any information that can be expressed in the form of an outline. The most common use of it so far is for bundles of RSS feeds. Any number of RSS feeds can be imported into or exported out of an RSS reader in OPML format, with the levels of the outline being the feed name, the URL of the feed, it’s home page URL, etc. See also the Grazr box on my right side bar for another example of an OPML file being displayed.

So, Share Your OPML is a place that you can upload the list of feeds you read and do all kinds of other interesting things. You can see who else reads the same feeds, who reads any feed at all, who reads feeds similar to your list, etc. The more people who contribute, the more helpful the system will be. I can’t encourage you enough to: go to your feed reader, find the “export feeds” option, save your list of feeds onto your desktop and then upload them to the Share Your OPML system. You may want to open the file on your desktop with a text editor and delete any particular feeds you don’t want to share first.

There has been some nay saying about this system, but I think it’s great. After the following “more” link I’ll detail some of the possibilities I see. Note also that the Share server may be a bit taxed because there’s a huge wave of interest right away.

• Prior to now it’s been nearly impossible to know who is subscribed to your or any other RSS feed. Feedburner does a whole lot for a blogger, but not this. It’s nice to be able to say, for example, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch only reads 373 feeds and one of them is mine. John Tropea of LibraryClips only reads 53 feeds and one of them is mine. Both are a real honor, and the kind of thing that makes me feel better about my daily page-view numbers (150-300) and total subscribers (385) – both small numbers by some standards. I also know that Steve Rubel is not subscribed to the Social Software blog I write for, despite having linked to it. So I can’t brag about that. Seriously, though, this type of qualitative measurement is becoming important in addition to quantitative measurements of a given news source.
• Group membership is unclear with RSS as it stands today. I know, for example, that there are about 40 of us participating in the NPTech attention stream for nonprofit technologists – who are they?
• Pitching bloggers for coverage, something I keep a public archive of good articles about, can now be done all the more intelligently. Reading someone’s blog for awhile is the best way to know about their interests, but knowing what else they read is helpful too.
• Recomendation engines are good. It’s nice that Share Your OPML will compare your list to other peoples’ and tell you who has a lot of overlap in subscriptions. That’s one more way to find blogs you might find useful, something I’ve written about previously as well.
• Expert recommendations can be found using this system as well. If I’m compiling an OPML file for someone in a given industry it will be nice to look at what experts in that industry are reading.
• Political sympathies are of interest to me. I can see, for example, who else is subscribed to Democracy Now and go from there. Obviously it’s nice that this is an opt-in system, so no one has to let me know what political sites they subscribe to.
• Imprisoned bloggers are a real issue around the world. The Committee to Protect Bloggers has been unable to garner enough financial support to work beyond its first year, but when a blogger goes to prison – it would be nice for supporters to be able to see a list of who their readers are as one more means to garner support.

These are just a small number of possibilities and I expect far more to shake out with use. Share Your OPML is a part of a larger Attention Economy that we’re all going to need to learn to navigate. Few blogrolls can hold the number or type of feeds that advanced RSS users, especially, read in their aggregator. Aggregating this information in a publicly available place like Share Your OPML has a lot of potential for future use.

Technorati Tags: OPML, ShareYourOPML, RSS, Web2.0, lists, nptech