November 17th, 2005
OPML, Audible, and Attention
Audible’s proffer of a proprietary format for podcasting generated a lot of heat and light, including some from Doc Searls that reverberated through a Gillmor Daily conversation we had that I’m now releasing in two parts, the first of which I just posted. At about the same time, Nick Bradbury and I released a joint post about attention, OPML, and namespaces. This evening in Washington Dave Winer released an advisory that likely will make what Nick and I are suggesting, and many other things, possible. And in New York, AttentionTrust cofounder Seth Goldstein released a post announcing his new attention service. As Seth says:
One final observation: the Internet business path is about to split. One direction leads to an open approach to data, governed by the principles of transparency and publicity. The other direction leads to a closed approach to data, focused on privacy and opacity: the black box. Both directions have legitimate and consistent end-user benefits and economic rationales . The danger is getting stuck in the middle: (1) looking to increase your edge but not locking up the information it is based on; or (2) promoting your open-ness but not sharing data back to the system.
I asked my wife to think of a song, any song. She said: Daydream Believer. Don’t know how she does it.
