At 6pm, after a full day of stimulating papers – it’s been a good day – most of us have stayed for a “birds of a feather” meeting that is in fact a tech demo session.

Marc Barrot shows a Web outliner he’s developing. Very cool. It’s based on OPML and is smart about pulling in photos (resizing dynamically for the frame) and even other outlines. You author locally and save to the Web. And there will be features to support group writing/editing. Looks beautiful.

Paolo Valdemarin and Matt Mower want to make it easier to find blog posts, so they invented a way for users in a group to share the topics their posts are about. They call this “K Collectors.”

Matt shows the K-Collector client. It suggests available topics when you blog and lets you choose them by clicking buttons. The suggestions are currently based on looking for word stems, a relatively simple agorithm that could be supplemented with something more sophisticated. Easy News Topics is their public specification for the easy inclusion of topics in RSS fields. ENT is way of transporting topics across applications. (It’s also OPML-based.)

The K-Collector server is an ENT-enabled RSS aggregator that can show different views based on the topics. You can show topics “related” to yours, and browse based on that.

Note from Matt Mower: “Although the topic roll part of K-Collector is OPML based, ENT is not (it’s an RSS 2.0 module).” Sorry for the confusion.

Very cool. They’ve lowered the bar to entering topic metadata. My question is whether the bar can ever be lowered enough without it still being a bar, except within specific, disciplined domains?

Categories: Uncategorized dw