Deep Thoughts from Dave Winer

In celebration of the launch of Share your OPML, here are some gems from Dave Winer at last week's Seattle Mind Camp:

• All communities grind to a halt eventually
• Blogging doesn't come to a halt
• You can't get users to do anything - it's pointless
• You have to become a user and do it
• RSS will never achieve 100% adoption
• unless we make it not about subscribing

That last point makes me think immediately of Lookmarks, and a couple of my loyal users who don't use RSS feeds. Lookmarks should recommend posts from feeds based on your bookmarks.

I haven't added any major features to Lookmarks in about a year. I have been watching from the sidelines as others implemented open search, recommending aggregators, and social search engines. I would like to build all of this into Lookmarks, but I want to get the mix just right.

Back to OPML, did you know that the structure of OPML allows you to delegate sections of your taxonomy to other OPML files (maintained by other people?)

Blog Carnivals

I have been blogging since 2003, but I hadn't discovered the concept of a "Blog Carnival" until this evening.

Carnivals are a technique for showcasing your blog. Most carnivals occur once a week. People who want to participate in the carnival send links to the carnival host, and he or she formats them all into a blog article. The organizer of the carnival tells people where it will be, and they all flock to the host's page and follow the links to the articles submitted. The host gets a big traffic spike and the participants get smaller spikes. Sometimes, the host or the participants find themselves added to a visitor's blogroll. Most carnivals are organized around a topic. - ConservativeCat

I discovered blog carnivals in a post by Steve Pavlina on how to build traffic to your blog (and ultimately earn more money). Of course, I immediately envisioned a Web site to co-ordinate the carnivals, but it looks like these guys have it covered.

So - should Lookmarks hold a "great links" carnival? Or, HelpShare host an "Experts making money" carnival?

I'm paying attention to Alex Barnet...

Because he is looking out for my data. I attended Alex's session on "attention" at MindCamp. I will send you off to his blog to read more about the concept of attention. It is a meme I've been keeping on the radar, and I think is about to become important. I doubt that Web sites will interoperate to exchange attention data. However, I do sense that the users of social applications will begin to want their data back.

As Alex hit on, my tags and preferences make up my online identity. Not to mention a large accumulation of effort. Applying an OPML file as a filter on sites like Findory and Megite amounts to portable personalization. Hearing Alex talk to Dave Winer, I had a vision for a new tag/OPML service, which I will elaborate on soon.

Tags

According to Technorati:

Nearly half (47%) of all blog posts have an author-generated category or set of tags associated with the post.

This is impressive to me. Tags are the defacto interop organization mechanism of the Web. Of course, Blogger doesn't implement them - so I can tag this post.

Mologo - The Geographic Web is here!

Mologo: "Share your location in real-time

Mologogo is a free service that will track a friend's GPS-enabled cell phone from another phone or on the web."

Wow, this looks great. You can view a map on the phone, and also track the phone remotely on the web. All for $99.