The Weeping Secretaries
I just returned from Dave
Winer's OPML presentation.
As Doc says here,
the new OPML platform Dave is developing is incredibly cool: totally
open and GPL'ed on the client and server side.
John
Sculley sat in for a while, which allowed us a chance to talk
about the good old days, when I was building Dynamac
luggables and Dave was publishing the MORE
outliner, which remains one of the best expressions of the genre, unlike the Dynamac.
Rick
Smolan, creator of the home run known as the "Day in the
Life" books, used MORE to manage the projects and carried our Dynamacs
to serve as their MORE support system. He told me that he couldn't have
produced "A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union" without that combo of
hard and soft ware. When they set up their Moscow office for six weeks,
they hired Russian secretaries who'd never seen a computer and taught
them MORE and the Macs and file exchange and laser printing in a day.
When they closed the office, the secretaries realized that
they would now go back to using Russian knockoffs of Smith Corona
manual typewriters.
The secretaries wept.
Dave's Annual Revolution
Tonight somebody asked Dave why he's put so much energy and
money into the OPML platform. He shared how citizen publishing has
always been his vision, and that he sees RSS as a start on that
vision, and that OPML gets us most of the way there.
But it occurred to me that there's another reason. This is
2005, and Dave hasn't changed the world in a year.
9:49:27 PM 
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