OPML, Attention, and TailRank

November 22, 2005 in RSS, attention, feeddemon, feeds, opml, tailrank

I just finished listening to the Attention Tech podcast on extending OPML to support Attention. Sounded a bit like the podcast that Alex Barnett and I did last week.

Nick Bradbury actually wrote a piece on this last week which I didn’t have a chance to read yet.

What I propose is that aggregator users and developers have an open discussion about what specific attention data could (and should) be collected by aggregators.

Although there’s a lot of attention data that could be stored in OPML, my recommendation is that we keep it simple – otherwise, we risk seeing each aggregator support a different subset of attention data. So rather than come up with a huge list of attributes, I’ll start by recommending a single piece of attention data: rank.

… simple is good. I’m all for simple.

Beyond rank, what other attention data do you think aggregators should collect?

Rank is a perfect start.

I’d also like the raw numbers. Number of times a feed was viewed. Number of times a story was launched in the browser. Number of times the user had multiple unread stories. This shouldn’t bloat the spec too much I hope. Certainly not a lot of data so file-size shouldn’t be an issue.

I can promise a number of things to encourage this spec moving forward:

  1. I’ll support OPML with namespaces in the Jakarta FeedParser. This also means that other aggregators (including Rojo) will have support for this in the future.
  2. I’ll factor this ranking into our TailRank reputation algorithms. I’m not certain the output would be different but it might help TailRank to recommend other feeds for the user.
  3. I’ll provide a way for TailRank members to export their OPML and retain this data. We don’t have OPML export now but it’s only because I haven’t had the time.
  4. I’ll ship an API that will allow people to automatically allow people to import OPML into TailRank directly from their aggregator. I plan on blogging this in the future but there’s a lot of cool stuff that can happen here.

This is just a start but it seems like there’s a lot of potential innovation here.