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Whew! Spent most of the day figuring out how CSS works within the OPML Editor, which is based on Frontier. I wanted to see how easy if might be to pretty up the new NewsRiver aggregator. Not that easy (if you've never spent any time with Frontier, which I hadn't). But now it will be easier for other people. That's kind of a nice feeling and a worthwhile way to spend your time, I think.

Dave's released a simple browser-based RSS feed reader, named NewsRiver, as a module of the OPML Editor.

The "River of News" style aggregator just displays one feed after another in a browser window -- no panes, no pain. The controls are in the menu within the OPML Editor client.

It's superfast, like the editor itself because a lot of what's happening is on your own computer. I like it.

Dave said he'd get some reaction from the OPML community, then open the beta to a wider group. You can try it now. OPML community membership is no big thing. You just install the editor and use it and you're a citizen. You will feel more a part of things if you test the blogging tool, though. Recent postings by OPML bloggers.

In looking around for more "beyond the browser" efforts and commentary, I'm wondering why it is that all talk of P2P elearning abruptly stopped around 2001. I think I might know.

See this resource index from the e-Learning Centre. No, it's not a case of a lazy webmaster or an abandoned page. Look around for youself; you'll find the same thing.

I think people are just plain scared of anything that smacks of P2P because it's become associated with breaking the law. It seems like I remember Adam Curry (a.k.a. 82.108.78.107) expressing something like this sentiment at a panel discussion at Gnomedex.

He said he didn't want to get into podcast delivery via Bittorrent* because of the taint. It may have been Dave who countered that there is nothing inherrently illegal about it. It's just how it mostly has been applied. And of course, what's his name, the BT guy, marketed it as a way to get back at the Man, so THAT hasn't helped one little bit.

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* About not wanting to get into free podcast delivery: I also have my suspicions that it's in Podshow's interest to be able to say to podcasters, "If your podcast gets popular, you won't be able to afford to deliver it." Although you don't hear much lately about that arm of their business -- hosting and other services for non-star podcasters.

Blog Savvy offers what looks like a pretty thorough census of LAMP tools that product multi-user blogging environments. Besides the usual suspects -- Drupal, Moveable Type, Word Press, Manila -- there's a name I hadn't seen: Elgg, which lets you build a Livejournal type community. It's in beta. AND, there's a project underway to integrate it with Moodle, my very favorite LMS -- open source or otherwise. I might just have to take it for a spin. There's a hosted version. Why do I have an urge to put it on my own server? Because I actually enjoy configuring and customizing new LAMP apps. Is that warped?

I keep thinking the OPML blogger community needs something in this line. Lots of times bloggers using the beta OPML editor yell across the backyard fence at each other in blog posts, but if you don't happen to be online at the same time that somebody is shouting to you, or you don't sub to everybody's feeds, you might miss the shout out.

Steve Sloan points out a pedagogical use for RSS Labs' new Powerpoint to OPML tool. I wouldn't have thought of that, partly because I wouldn't have wanted to, because I dislike Powerpoint.

Powerpoint has its uses (and an entrenched place) in academe, but I don't like the cultural changes I think it has introduced into business, such as the belief that an idea is too complicated if it can't be reduced to a bullet point, or the tendency to stare at the screen while the speaker reads the screen to you.

Steve Sloan dips into OPML using the browser-based OPML Manager. EdTech folks interested in OPML also should check out the OPML Editor, also still in beta.

Playing around with it will give you a better idea of both the current state of OPML capabilities, and its promise. I'm talking about things like the buddy feature in its instant outliner which makes for a nice collaboration tool.

OPML can be so much more than blogrolls and directories. And now with Microsoft's recently announced Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE), all kinds of things we never even thought about may be possible.

Alex Barnett helps us get OPML, pointing to Jim Moore's post on the joys of distributed directories. Alex ends up not exactly throwing up his hands, maybe throwing up just one hand, by saying what I've said here about OPML: "Well, you'll just have to try it."

Why have I never until just this moment isolated the "throwing up" part of the expression, to throw up one's hands.

I've been looking at Konfabulator because I have this funny feeling that widgets and gadgets are going to take off again. Microsoft is getting in the game and just starting to push developers to make gadgets as part of live.com.

Plus, Konfabulator's maker, Pixoria, was acquired by Yahoo over the summer. There was a little buzz about it, then I haven't heard much more. Maybe there's buzz on a frequency I can't hear, some community I'm not tuned into? I don't know.

Widgets interest me because:

• They're slick and cute.
• They're part local/part internet, like the OPML Editor I've been spending so much time with.
• They're internet not in a browser.

Just started checking them out, but Microsoft's gadgets don't appear to be housed on the desktop and they are in a browser, so that makes them less interesting to me.

When you browse through the Konfabulator gallery you see mostly uninspired creations, like 200 or so RSS readers each for a single feed. Looks like they're made mostly by kids, given the number of gaming-related widgets, the writing style of the newbie tutorial, and the fact that the concept's roots are in the skinnable desktop MP3 players that were so hot five years ago.

So much more could be done with them, so I'm keeping my eye on them.

Here's a cartoon history of Konfabulator that illustrates the creativity and ironic humor of the folks behind it. I love how users are portrayed as enthusiastic while prospective development partners are bumps on a log, or just not ready to see the flash of genius. The medicine show guy in the picture brings Dave to mind, only he seems able to get all kinds of important people and regular folks all stirred up along with him.

And check out the illustration of Mac vs PC users on page 8 of the cartoon story. These guys are great.

Here's one thing I've discovered while testing the OPML Editor over the past three or four months: writing in an outliner makes writing easier. That's why I think it's a great tool for students, and why I keep bugging my sister-in-law to try it out in her freshmen comp classes.

An outliner is the perfect note-taking tool. Thoughts just seem to flip right in there without much mediation between brain and words on the screen. It's kind of hard to process what that means unless you try it, so you should try it. It's free.

Then, once the notes are up there on the screen, they have these pleading eyes. They beg you to elaborate on them. Honestly, I can't tell you now many times I have started blunt little posts on my OPML blog, like "Saw the Pew survey on podcasting. I'm not buying it." Before I know it, I get this irresistible desire to make real sentences out of those little grunts because I know how easy it's going to be to flesh them out and publish them instantly.

Publishing feels not only quicker, but somehow closer because there's no uploading, just upstreaming, which doesn't transfer the whole file each time you make a change. And there's no separate process when you publish -- when you save your file on your computer it's saved online at the same time. Your words are out there on the internet, but all the while you're feeling it's all happening very locally (because it is).

The outline becomes the finished piece in an effortless way. It's not like the dreaded index cards from which you wrote your term paper, where the processes were completely separate. It's all part of the same process. It's more like the sketching that a painter does on a canvas, later to be painted over, than it is like a film director's storyboards, which need to be executed in an entirely different medium.

When I added Hil's cars to the "All the cars we've ever owned" distributed OPML directory, and read that she drives a Holden Commodore, I had to know what that was. Holden is an Oz division of GM. Car names are so funny, anywhere, any time period. At least the model name is a real word.

Personally I bristle against the marketing practice the last 15-20 years of naming products or companies with made-up words that have been scientifically determined to sound right for the purpose. Lots of times they contain part of a real word that's supposed to appeal to us. Like Acura, which I imagine is supposed to make us think of accuracy or precision. Or Accenture; what's that supposed to convey? Accent implying sharp, cutting edge incisiveness, I suppose.

Why can't we have real words?

If you want to to inclue your car list in the roll, just make an OPML file in this format:

Car make and model
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And e-mail me to tell me the URL. amybellinger ATATAT gmail.com.