Ever since attending the Berkeley stop of Dave Winer’s OPML editor roadshow, I’ve been playing seriously with the software. A number of its capabilities are exciting to me, notably its collaborative capabilities. For example…

• You can add the URL to somebody else’s OPML file as an outline element of your own and all of its pieces will become part of your outline
• You can store an OPML file online and allow others to revise it

It’s going to take a while for the benefits of a collaborative outlining tool to spread. Hell, I’m still working to wrap my mind around it myself. But in the meantime, I decided to try my hand at it in a couple of ways. First, I’m creating the show outline for “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report” in OPML and storing it online. Neville simple opens a copy of the software and opens the file from its URL, and he’s able to make additions and changes. That’s a lot easier than emailing attachments back and forth.

Next, I figured it would be easier to maintain my blogroll for this blog as OPML files. That way, whenever I want to add or delete a blog from the roll, I can do it in the outlining software rather than mess with my blog template. The template just points to the various files. The only problem here was getting the template to recognize that it was pulling in an OPML file. Confused about how to do that, I went to the Expression Engine support forum and asked. I was pointed to a plugin developer named Yoshi Melrose, who cranked out an OPML plugin for me (and everyone else using Expression Engine) in about 10 minutes. And it rocks…as does Yoshi.

As a result, my blogrolls are now all OPML-enabled, so not only is it easy for me to keep them updated, but I’ve been able to add a link to each OPML file so anybody can download them and use them as they wish.

Okay, so OPML may strike you as overly geeky, especially for a right-brained communicator, but I think it’s exciting.