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   <img border="0" src="/admindata/images/Opiebanner.jpg" title="Opie at large" alt="Opie at large" class="image-full" /></a><br /><br />

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   Thursday, November 30:&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /><br />Surprisingly warm day, but skies are gray, here west of Boston.&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /><br />The good news is that the activist agenda is moving along.&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /><br />And the software base is solid and reliable.&nbsp; New releases every two days.&nbsp; We have had not a single major bug in new code for a very long time--testimony to the underlying architecture and the continuing care in coding.&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /><br />We are learning each day more about Agile development.&nbsp; Agile development requires daily discussions and daily goals, lots of close, careful interaction.&nbsp; Agile development requires the ability to "helicopter" between architecture and strategy, to use cases, implementation, to resources and micro-schedule.&nbsp; At heart, it takes a village that wants to live and work in a particular way.&nbsp; Thanks team!

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   I&nbsp; can write something here, responding to the news and opportunities of the day.&nbsp;

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   Thanksgiving morning!<br /><br />Lots to give thanks for this year...The software is coming along nicely, lots of cool stuff out there in the world of citizen-created content, including widgets, video, open source code, as well as academic course notes, bibliographies, lots of interesting things being done by librarians with wikis, etc. etc. etc...<br /><br />A wonderful cornocopia of the commons!<br /><br />My biggest discovery, by way of my kids, is rap music, or rather, rap, as a wide, deep, creative world of commentary and reflection..Reflection from the bottom up, sometimes, but increasingly thoughtful..

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   <img width="47" height="47" style="border-width: 0px;" alt="Greenworld.gif" src="../../admindata/images/Greenworld.gif" id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_grdOtherImages_ctl02_imgFile" /><br />Saturday afternoon, November 18:&nbsp; I am having a lot of fun with the new site design.&nbsp; Really fast coding, really fast ajax inclusion.<br /><br />Pretty cool.&nbsp; The funny thing is, none of the people working on this design are professional designers (mary, diane, me). We are systems architects and coders--what we did was simply make the cleanest possible interface.

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   <img width="47" height="47" id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_grdOtherImages_ctl02_imgFile" src="../../admindata/images/Greenworld.gif" alt="Greenworld.gif" style="border-width: 0px;" /><br />If you are looking for somewhere to go for lunch on election day, and are in the Cambridge area, or can log into Second Life, here is a suggestion. Our friend Lisa Williams' remarkable Placeblog is focusing on the election:<br /><br />From Lisa today:<br /><br /><em>Hi!<br />It may still be possible to get a seat at this event, one of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society's regular lunch talks. If you're interested, email the wonderful Erica George at egeorge@cyber.law.harvard.edu. If you're not near Harvard Square, this event will be available as a Webcast and a live broadcast to Second Life, the massively multiplayer online environment, where the Berkman Center has its own island and conference center. *Participating in person or online is free and if you want more details you can find them here*: <br />http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/fellows_luncheon_series<br /><br />*Placeblogger will also be entering a limited alpha release on Election Day -- we're looking for a few people who are interested in blogs and citizen journalism to poke around the site* and tell us what your favorite blogs are (we're doing a feature on the Top 10 Local Blogs in America. We have our picks, but we want to know what you think). People who use RSS readers and can load an OPML file into them are especially welcome, as we're testing our ability to provide custom OPML reading<br />lists of blogs to visitors. If you're interested, email me at lisa@cadence90.com.<br /><br />Lisa Williams<br />lisa@cadence90.com<br /><br /><br />*Placeblogs Across the Nation on Election Day*<br />The Berkman Center for the Internet and Society<br />23 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA<br />Thursday, Nov. 7, 2006<br />12PM<br /><br />*Lisa Williams of H2otown.info*, a notable news and community site for Watertown, MA, will discuss Placeblogger.com, a browsable directory and live aggregator of 650 placeblogs. Williams is building Placeblogger in cooperation with the Center for Citizen Media and Pressthink. *Dan Gillmor, executive director of the Center for Citizen Media*, will also be on hand.<br /><br />*Placeblogs are blogs devoted to a geographical community* -- town, city, county. They are online watering holes to gather and knit up increasingly frayed communities where, in winter, people leave for work in the dark and come home in the dark -- and don't know their neighbors.<br /><br /></em>

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   <img width="47" height="47" id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_grdOtherImages_ctl02_imgFile" src="../../admindata/images/Greenworld.gif" alt="Greenworld.gif" style="border-width: 0px;" /><br />Good Monday afternoon. We are still playing with the software, getting ready to do some sort of a quiet launch by next Monday. Today we are putting in a new WSWIG editor into the outliner. And continuing to work on features for our next release.<br /><br />I am acutely aware that I don't know what a workstation for peace should do. All of the things that make online communities so much fun--shared purpose, posse, chance meetings, action and creativity--they still have to be invented in the context of working together here online to create ecosystems for peace.<br /><br />The good news is that we have been building, layer by layer, a foundation for communities of practice. The technology is strong. The feature set is powerful. The tool for site and site ecosystem creation is flexible and quick to implement ideas.<br /><br />But I admit it, I'm a platform inventor, not a community leader. So I am looking for collaborators. <br /><br />I am doing some informal recruiting of friends and acquaintances (and new friends and acquaintances) who know more than I do about social revolutions and how to make them.<br /><br />Get in touch if you have ideas you want to share or implement. <br /><br />I can be reached at secondsuperpower@yahoo.com<br /><br />Or just sign up for an account and start experimenting tonight.<br /><br />Best,<br /><br />Opie

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   Technology for Peace

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      Click here for Opie's morning meditations..for Saturday, November 4, 2006

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         Hi, This is Opie,<br/><br/>What is my purpose? I would like, in my wildest dreams, to find others who want to create a kind of "world of peacecraft"--that is, a world where we can work together in squads, get to know one another, share lives, and work in our little parts of the whole to promote peace.<br/><br/>Warm best wishes and a big friendly invitation to sign up and blog or post or put peace widgets here!<br/><br/>Peace,<br/><br/>Opie

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      The trends ("there is nothing so significant as a good trend")

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         Celebrate the proliferation of inventions in the Web 2.0 ecosystem

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            Many new use cases: Feed management, hierarchical blogrolls, a super-set of tagging, reading lists, podcasts, vlogs, distributed databases, web-service mashups, and Ajax-based start pages and dashboards.

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            Many new user-contributed sources: Public video (YouTube, Google Video, Brightcove, iBlink), audio, images.

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            Many new dynamic sources: Spanning Sales Force/Salesforce.com, SAP, Taskable, Google calendar and other office services.

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            Many new "embeds" and widgets: YouTube flash video player, Google widgets, Ajax widgets of all stripes and sizes.

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            Many new viewers: Personal start pages (Netvibes, Google), Ajax widgets that read OPML (Grazr).

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            Mobile, PDA, Blackberry applications of OPML expanding rapidly, through combination of the natural applicability of lists and outlines to mobile, community support for river-of-news viewing of dymanic information, and the introduction of list writers for mobile.

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         Hierarchical XML is vital to the future of the web ecosystem, and OPML is it

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            "Eating feeds" has become the major active metaphor for purposeful action within the Web 2.0 ecosystem.

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            The ecosystem has become rich, but hardly tractable: It is hard to know what to eat. It is difficult to know how to cook what you eat.

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            We believe that hierarchical XML with a simple open structure-i.e. OPML-provides a powerful way to collect, catalogue, archive, secure, search, sort, organize and provide rapid access to relevant material in the ecosystem.

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      Steps toward a theory of technology for peace ("there is nothing so useful as a good theory")

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         Technology for Peace helps to establish ecosystems of communicaton among people who are dedicated to peace and to living from a peaceful heart.<br/><br/>As individual technologists we don't need to do that much these days, because there is a deep underlying movement carrying us all:<br/><br/>Technology is getting easier and cheaper, going to zero cost (to us activists) in all key dimensions:<br/><br/>Zero cost of communication.<br/>Zero cost of custom applications (see the variety in the profusion of web widgets).<br/>Zero cost for infrastructure services including bandwidth and hosting.<br/><br/>The world economy continually reorganizes itself around resources that are free or near free relative to their value.<br/><br/>The value of communication is rising, the cost is going to zero.<br/>So we have the opportunity to organize ourselves around free worldwide communication, supported by all manner of communication-enhancing applications ranging from buddy lists and team spaces, to dashboards the keep us informed of moment-to-moment movements and developments of interest.<br/><br/>This workstation is designed to help us create workstations (personal) and teams and social networks for peace. It provides very little direct infrastructure itself. Rather, it is a platform for organizing and integrating our application of the free resources that are burdgeoning around us.<br/><br/>This platform gives you the ability to sit on top of, inside of, the resources of the global technology movement, and put these resources to use for peace. That, at least, is our guiding vision.<br/><br/>YouTube, Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, MySpace--these are all zero cost resource services. Now we can start to weave them into a ecosystem of peace. This workstation is intended to become a weaving shop, with access to (free of course) looms.

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   Welcome to the new version of OPML Workstation

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      Thanks to the OPML Community

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         It has been nice co-evolving with you over the past year!

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         We are genuinely grateful!

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      Thanks to Dave Winer

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         Dave Winer is of course the inventor of OPML. Indeed, he is the pioneer of outlines and outlines of knowledge in personal computing. He invented and perfected the first outliner for personal computing, "More" on the Mac. This invention, with Guy Kawasaki suggesting a slide presentation mode, led directly to PowerPoint. <br/><br/>For Dave, the vision of outlining is not in pitches, but in the embodiment of human knowledge in accessible form. When Dave came to Harvard in 2003, he came not only to establish the first university blogging system--which he did--but to see if he could help Harvard make its knowledge more accessible, not just through blogging, but through outlining. This is still a dream I believe is important, not so much for Harvard of course, but for knowledge in general.<br/><br/>Interestingly, Harvard figures in a second key aspect of Dave's modus. He believes in what I would call "centers of diffision" of ideas and applications. He came to Harvard because he knew that if he got Harvard to accept blogging, which he did, blogging would spread across other universities. <br/><br/>Similarly, he put enormous effort into getting the New York Times to be the first major newspaper to make available RSS feeds. He knew, rightly, that if the New York times moved on RSS, other papers would follow.<br/><br/>He did the same with promoting bloggers as serious intellectuals. He worked with Christopher Lydon, a well-known public radio talk-show host, interviewer and community-leader with the very top intellectual credentials in radio (e.g. Shakespeare-expert Harold Bloom and economist Jeffrey Sachs are mainstays on Lydon's shows.). Dave helped Chris to do a comprehensive set of public-radio-quality interviews with the top blogging intellectuals across the world. These interviews, by the way, are the first podcasts.<br/><br/>There is much more. Like John Appleseed, Dave moves on and founds new orchards. Any particular orchard is a unique asset that once established becomes a core resource within a particular locale, as well as being a source of fruit and innovation for the wider apple-eating and apple-raising community. Dave leaves an orchard he has planted, putting it in the hands of locally-situated gardeners who tend the garden and look after its health, development and evolution. For example, the Berkman Thursday Night Club that Dave founded to evangalize blogging at Harvard continues to meet, years after Dave moved on.<br/><br/>To recap just a bit more history. In the spring of 2004 Dave and Chris would climb into Dave's car and head from Boston up to New Hampshire, recording the speeches of presidential candidates and bringing blog attention to and bloggers deep into the presidential campaigning process. Meetings with voters in New Hampshire that were once small private affairs, were now also material for online town meetings in the blogosphere.<br/><br/>Dave was the one who initially pushed me to send to bloggers Joi Ito, Doc Searls, and others my fiery little analysis of the potential power of networked online activists in world peace politics "The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head" (Esme Caramello gave it the title, as she explained the contents of an early draft to friends at a dinner party.). Through their promotion it got out to the world.<br/><br/>While staying studiously independent in the 2004 Presidential Primaries, Dave told the world that he would help any campaign that would have him. By that time I was spending half my time in Burlington, and was able to convey Dave's offer personally. Not surprisingly, the Dean campaign web group, led by Nicco Mele, embraced Dave. <br/><br/>Dave advocated a complete rethink of the campaign. Raise money on the web, and give away free blogs to all, of all political parties and persuasions. Commit yourself to dialogue. Be absolutely transparent. Instead of saying that you will do good when you are elected, take the money you have and do good now. Wire the ghettos. Wire the world. Some of Dave's ideas were deamed too radical even for the Dean campaign, but in my view they would have made us a much more effective force for change. The critique that we became an "echo chamber" was probably more right than most admit. Dave saw that problem right away. The way to change the world is to make inclusive, open public goods, and invite all folks in. From the dialogue comes the change.<br/><br/>Dave was one of the early supporters of Rebecca McKinnon. Rebecca is an expert on China, has lived for years in China, and led the CNN Bureau in China and the Far East. She is a very effective journalist who came to Harvard as a Neiman Fellow. Rebecca has an extraordinary network of fellow correspondents around the world. Her vision was and is the create a true, open world media. Dave helped her to shape the vision that, with Ethan Zuckerman, she is achieving with Global Voices Online. Global Voices now has a worldwide network of blog-based citizen journalists, logs about a million unique visitors a month to its own site, and is closely connected the Reuters worldwide.<br/><br/>When Dave went west I didn't see as much of him, but we all knew he was doing something important at Microsoft. What he was doing, it turned out, was helping that company--like Harvard, like the New York Times, like the Democractic party--see that it could help itself by aligning with history and supporting the most open, fundamental version of RSS--resisting the temptation as a technology compay to spin its own variant--and making that version available absolutely everywhere. Within a few months of Dave living in Seattle, and with (apparently) a lot of help from Robert Scoble and other believers within the company, Microsoft made its historic announcement supporting RSS. The forthcoming Vista operating system will put sophisticated RSS and OPML capabilities on upward from 180 million desktops.<br/><br/>I know that all this sounds almost preposterous--like telling the Forest Gump story as genuine history. As a writer of business accounts that are called "real time business history" by the editor of the Harvard Business Review, let me assure that I am not making this stuff up.<br/><br/>OPML is still at the beginning. We will see where it goes. Sitting here writing this morning, it occured to me that we might call it "Open Peace Markup Language." How about it, Dave? <br/><br/>We could have a technical standard with an embedded point of view about community and the purpose of community innovation. Sort of like how Really Simple Syndication has come to connote do-it-yourself open media.

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      OPML Workstation is a test-bed for next-generation applications

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         New Features in the New OPML Workstation

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            Improved Outliner<br/><br/>Posts and Outlines<br/><br/>We have adopted a "blog-and-outline-based" nomenclature" in order to make it easier for you to think like a bloggers but work in outlines.<br/><br/>We call a post a "Post."<br/><br/>A "Post" is sometimes by others called a leaf, an element, a node on an outline, or--most confusingly if most logically proper--a sub-outline.<br/><br/>We call an outline an "Outline."<br/><br/>An "Outline" is sometimes called by others a feed, a file, an OPML blog, a blogroll, a reading list, a tree, or a directory. Of course an outline can and often is all those things.<br/><br/>Still, we wanted to find a rough-and-ready, serviceable term for the two most fundmental components of the OPML world.<br/><br/>(For more on this matter, click the expansion on this post, above.)

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               On Posts and Outlines for various uses<br/><br/>We have been around and around this question, as you might expect. <br/><br/>Outlines are very general knowledge structures. <br/><br/>This generality is both a strength from the standpoint of tool versatility, and a weakness in terms of how one cues users about what they are doing.<br/><br/>If one is making a podcast, each node might be a day, or a podcast, or contain the metadata on a file.<br/><br/>If one is making a reading list, each node might indicate an RSS feed.<br/><br/>If one is making a general business or research and scientific or academic outline, each node might be an idea--or a theme, or a note.<br/><br/>If one is thinking in terms of business presentations and PowerPoint-based conventions, each node would be a slide.<br/><br/>You see the problem.<br/><br/>And you can see the opportunity: After all, you can use posts and outlines to structure and share knowledge of all sorts. Linked outlines are among the most powerful and yet primitive tools of human thinking.<br/><br/>Let us know what you think the solution might be. An alternative, of course, is to let the user choose. We have set up the code so that this can be done quickly if users want it. Similarly, there are attribute conventions that are more appropriate for one use case or another..and the program can be set to default to both terminology and attributes...OK, food for thought! Geek to Geek.

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            Next Actions<br/><br/>One-click subscription to a range of viewers.<br/><br/>We include Ajax viewers like Grazr that can be easily configured and embedded on third-party start pages like Netvibes, and/or embedded in one's blog or Google Pages page.<br/><br/>Let us know about your Ajax and similar viewers and applications. We believe that the binding together of Ajax and OPML into new micro-applications is a vast new field of innovation. We want to help.

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         OPML Workstation is your environment for rapid development.

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         OPML Workstation is free for community, educational and experimental purposes.

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         A trained user of OPML Workstation can go from idea to prototype to production OPML-based service within minutes.

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         OPML Workstation is constructed on a solid, scaleable, reliable, enterprise-class technology base.

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         OPML Workstation provides for private innovation spaces, password protected files, and several levels of semi-public and public access. Those wanting higher levels of security should contact us directly.