Posts tagged as: opmlcamp

OPML Camp update

It's been 2 weeks since the new May 20-21 dates were announced for OPML Camp, and we already have over 20 participants signed up. We also have a snazzy new logo, thanks to Matt Terenzio. Progress is being made on the proposed sessions, and Harvard should be letting me know the exact room assignments at the Law School in a few days. There is also a new About OPML Camp page on the blog with more details. You can register for free by leaving a comment on the Signup page.

OPML Camp will be held at Harvard Law School on May 20-21

The original plan was to hold OPML Camp at my house in late April, which would have limited attendance to a maximum of 30 people. After two weeks we already had 17 people signed up, so it looked like we would fill up well before the event. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society has now agreed to be a partner in organizing OPML Camp, and is providing space at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass. We'll have use of a lecture hall that can hold 75-100 people, and some smaller classrooms for breakout sessions. Due to scheduling requirements at the Law School, we have to move the date to the weekend of May 20-21, but that will give us time to fill the extra space. The weather should be a lot better also. Many thanks to John Palfrey, Berkman's Executive Director, and Colin Maclay and Catherine Bracy of the Berkman staff for making this possible.

You can find complete details and a sign up page on the OPML Camp blog. OPML Camp is inspired by events like Bar Camp and Mashup Camp, and is completely free and open to anyone interested in RSS and OPML.

For those of you who were looking forward to the camp sessions scheduled for my hot tub, don't worry. We'll hold a barbeque the first night of the camp at my house, and the pool will also be open and heated by then.

Creating an OPML 2.0 namespace

Matt Terenzio, one of the OPML Camp attendees, has suggested that we hold a session on OPML namespaces. This is permitted in the OPML 2.0 spec: "An OPML file may contain elements and attributes not described on this page, only if those elements are defined in a namespace, as specified by the W3C." We should definitely do this, but maybe we could take this one step further and create an OPML Camp namespace that we can all experiment with. If an OPML Adv... oops ... Stan... oops ... if a publicly recognized group discussing OPML is formed, this namespace can be given over to them to hold and maintain.

Four month anniversary

This weekend I reached my 4 month anniversary as a blogger, so it seems like a good time to pause and take stock. First a few numbers:

• I am now maintaining 4 blogs: Darwinianweb.com, Mashup.darwinianweb.com, Ruby.darwinianweb.com, and OPMLcamp.com. One Ruby project turned into RubyRiver.org, which is an online RSS aggregator that runs automatically. So I have a total of 5 active sites.
• I have written 400 posts across these blogs, with the majority here on Darwinianweb.com.
• The total traffic for all of these sites now averages 1,500 visitors a day. This includes RSS subscriptions, but not the people who read RSS feeds at online aggregators.
• Technorati.com ranks the Darwinianweb.com domain at 13,506, and seems to lump all the subdomains together. Which puts it in the top 0.05% of the 29 million blogs that Technorati tracks. I guess that's pretty good for 4 months, but it also demonstrates how little traffic the average blog out of those 29 million actually gets.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to focus on when I started, but felt that the general area of Web 2.0 would be most interesting. I've looked at a lot of Web technologies, but my focus has clearly narrowed down to RSS, OPML, and mashups over the last two months. I've also found myself drawn to the social and political forces controlling the Web and the blogosphere. This may seem surprising for a technologist, but it matches fairly closely the way I ended up spending my time as a dBASE guru in the Eighties and early Nineties. I love software, but software is built by people, and you can't understand why they build what they do if you don't understand their motivations.

One reason why I became a blogger was the hope that it would allow me to meet people who are doing cool things with software and the Web. That has certainly worked out. I've gotten to know dozens of new people in the tech world, many of whom are doing exciting development work or writing interesting things about technology. I also wanted to meet younger developers who I might be able to advise on their products. I get a real thrill from helping to design desktop software and online apps, and I'm now working closely with a few startups with real promise. I don't want to get involved with investing in any new companies yet, so my relationships are purely taking a mentoring role.

Over the next 4 months I'd like to do a lot more work with APIs, help a few products get launched, and see if the OPML Camp idea can go anywhere. I'm finding the Camp phenomenon fascinating. I had to get my capitalist head into the anti-capitalist Open Source space in the late Nineties. Now I have to adapt my control freak experience of running seminars and conferences to the idea of an anarchic model of running an event.

One thing I must try not to do in the coming months is start any more blogs. I have more than enough of those.

April looks like OPML month in Boston

One thing I like about blogging is that it forces to me to work through ideas "out loud," which generally helps me think of better solutions. When it comes to OPML Camp, writing about it on the camp blog has made me realize that a productive path would be to hold a smaller camp, earlier than I'd planned, perhaps as early as mid-April. This would help grow a community of interested people in the Boston area that could support a larger camp at a later date. Last night I posted this idea on the blog and I've received a number of emails in favor of it. For some reason, there are people who are reluctant to pop their heads out on the blog comments. Hopefully that will change over time. Soon after my posting, Dave Winer also wrote about taking the OPML Editor on the road in April. The permalink for this is broken, so I'll quote him for now and add the permalink when it starts to work: "I'm thinking about a series of OPML Roadshows in April, to take the 1.0 release around the U.S. to show it off. So far I've asked about venues in Cambridge, New York and Seattle." So it looks like April will be a busy time for OPML fans here. That's great. I want to see as many people get a chance to grok OPML as possible. Then we can get even more tools built. It would be a good thing to have OPML join RSS as a key industry here in RSS Alley.

Update: The signup sheet for the April camp is now available. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Planning begins for OPML Camp

Now that I've had a chance to see how Mashup Camp went, I'm going to begin the planning on my proposed OPML Camp. You can follow the process at the camp blog.

OPML Camp is coming to Boston

One idea that came out of last night's Geek Dinner was to do an OPML Camp in the Boston area. I'd like to wait to announce this until there is more (some) planning done, but what the hell. This is another one of those Web 2.0 practices, announce and then plan. I've registered opmlcamp.com, and am working on setting up a venue. There should be a date, wiki, and signup page ready in about a week. Stay tuned...

(Credit goes to Brian Del Vecchio for suggesting an OPML Camp)