More on OPML and Reading Lists
February 28th, 2006Ellyssa Kroski has joined the OPML-Newbies group and has started playing with Reading Lists. She’s created an OPML file of library conference related stuff. Although, she writes:
“As I created and tested my OPML file, I discovered that although it is easy to add plain html links to the outline, the news reader tools are primarily focused on subscriptions. As it turned out, the majority of my resources were not RSS feeds and so didn’t appear within my reader nor did they look as snazzy in the outline. Hopefully future readers will provide increased functionality for non-rss resources because this file type is a great way to gather and display resources of all different file types.”
Shucks.
On another note, David Bigwood is playing with OPML and had an interesting idea about using it in MARC records:
“[W]e could include OPML files inside a MARC record. Field 505, contents, for example. Often a book will have topical sections with chapters and subchapters. There is no clean, easy way to mark-up this in MARC. Its a snap in OPML. Or how about links to an e-book and then to each chapter of that book. We could have a string of 856 fields or an OPML file in one field that our users could expand as necessary. Just some initial thoughts.”
Another potential use for Reading Lists, this time in education. Many professors are assigning blogs as required reading. If they want to add blogs during the course of the semester (or if the students want to add others), theyt could create a Reading List and update as needed. The students’ aggregators (they would have to be compatible with Reading Lists of course) will automatically update with the new blogs. No excuse for not reading assignments (”I totally forgot to add that feed to my aggregator”).
Heh.