There’s just so much I want to write about coming out of the Supernova and Gnomedex conferences the past five days. But instead of creating a supremely long post, I’ll mostly point to others’ comments and photos and begin work on editing the citizens video clips I took this week.
One thing I wanted to expand upon, however: On Thursday morning, when Dave Winer kicked off the un-conference (singing “Yellow Submarine” was a nice touch) with the announcement about his new open-source OPML Editor tool, I raised this point from the floor as a member of the project team but also as a member of the acronym police.
First, some very quick background: Dave Winer, who received due recognition at the conference as the father of blogging (as well as one of the creators of podcasting and an important figure in the widespread adoption of RSS), is launching a very cool new initiative centered on OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language, an XML format for outlines); see the Wikipedia definition. He’s heading up a project to create an OPML Editor, which will make it much, much easier to edit your blogroll, move stuff around on your blog, etc., all through drag and drop simplicity. Fantastic! (Here’s Dave’s mp3 podcast about it from his hotel room Thursday.)
I suggested this from the floor Thursday morning: Dave, those of us here at this conference are in a self-contained bubble, with geeks talking to geeks. You said you wanted this technology to spread to millions of desktops. So why do we continue to use cryptic acronyms to describe these new technologies?
I mentioned that more than half the U.S. public still doesn’t know what a blog is. Dave interrupted me, doubting that that was the case. (It is the case: See this March 2005 CNN story: Poll: Most Americans unfamiliar with blogs — in fact, 74 percent don’t know what they are. And here are similar results from the Pew Internet & American Life Project from May 2005.) I said an even smaller number of people know what RSS is (indeed, Yahoo has taken to not using the term RSS in luring people to try out the technology; news reports often refer to it as “Internet news feeds” because few people like cryptic terms like RSS).
I told Dave that fewer than 1 in 100 people probably knows what OPML is, much less what it stands for. So, since we’re at the very beginning of this project, why not come up with a more user-friendly term right at the outset?
Dave first responded, “You’re not going to like my answer” but then said that it was a point that I could raise within the OPML team discussion list. So, I’ll try to make my case there, once I get a better handle on all of the things this blog editor tool does.
The best term for this I’ve heard so far, from Marc Canter: Instant Outlining.
Other stuff:
Adam Curry delivered a stirring keynote about taking back our media. Listen to the mp3 here.
Here are more than 200 posts that contain Technorati tags for Gnomedex and Gnomedex2005.
Here are gnomedex hits from Feedster, Daypop and BlogPulse.
Here’s a partial list of the Gnomedex attendees, with links to their blogs or websites.
The big news (for traditional media) coming out of Gnomedex was that Microsoft would incorporate RSS into its next operating system, Longhorn due out next year (or in 2010, as Steve Gillmor suggested). Coverage included:
Mitch Ratcliffe on the Microsoft RSS announcement.
Dan Farber at ZDNet: Gnomedexers gather around RSS.
Jo Twist at BBC News: Microsoft makes web feeds easier.
Frank Barnako did one of the best jobs of distilling the sessions at Gnomedex.
Bob Morris on Adam Curry’s keynote and a bit of silliness with me, Chris Pirillo and Robert Scoble on the red couch.
Mitch Ratcliffe offers his take on the faceoff between Dave Winer and Audible’s Don Katz.
Geek News Central: Winer and Microsoft Gnomedex Keynotes Online.
Scott Beale, aka Laughing Squid, who attended my book release party last month and took these shots there, also took a few hundred shots at Gnomedex, including the shot of Chris Pirillo at top.
More photos from Ianiv & Arieanna.
Chris Pirillo’s opening remarks and Gnomenclature.
Technorati tags: gnomedex, gnomedex2005
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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