There seems to be a revival of interest in ThreadsML, a standard Steve Yost of QuickTopic proposed be developed. The revival is mainly due to Matt Mower and Paolo Valdemarin‘s Easy News Topics (ENT) proposal. ENT lets RSS 2.0 include metadata about the topic of the news feed, and seems to be an open and generous standard allowing pointers to the existing topic metadata standards. For example, Marc Canter writes (in an email): “ENT is … something any software developer can add in very quickly. It would also be 100% compatible with any parallel RDF or XTM efforts. That’s KEY!”

ThreadsML would, in theory, enable discussion threads to be shared among instant messaging, email, chat, UseNet style discussions and anything else that wants ’em. Marc suggests that we alter ThreadsML to get it to work with ENT. A new branch of the ThreadsML discussion is here.

I’m favor of anything that will help preserve the value of threads. (FWIW, I get credit as ThreadsML’s first official booster. I think there’s a T-shirt involved.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw