Over the last six months I have kept meaning to switch to outline style blogging.
For all the hoo ha about OPML as a standard for reading lists – you might reasonably ask why not use RSS – after all RSS is often used for playlists so what could the difference be?
The difference is really fairly subtle, but also very important, and the real answer has nothing to do with syndication, but the process of writing and what people who evangelize outliners have been trying to persuade people for years.
The comments on Anil Dash: Outlining a Blog are a really clear illustration of the problem.
Later generation blogging tools were designed with the influence of RSS which in turn was influenced by news headline syndication.
This meant that every post had a headline and with only one default template for post styles post templates tended to look like news stories with a big bold headline and text beneath.
If you want to post small snippets, the news story style format is a problem. If you put the headline in the body, then what do you use for the headline? If you use the snippet as the headline, the bodyless post looks empty and you can’t put links to sites mentioned in the snippet in the headline.
Non outline style blogging leads to the type of writing where you feel compelled to make every post a mini essay. This is bad for both writers and readers – since most people don’t want to read essays about everything and most bloggers don’t really want to write essays about everything.
The headlineless style allows people to write more freely and more often, note style – what blogging is about.
Reading through the comments on Anil’s site my gut feel is that the solutions to this are:
Multiple styles for post templates – headline or essay.
Dates/times as default headlines in syndicated outline style posts.
Named anchors as permalinks for individual entries within an outline style list post.
Ability to nest OPML within RSS within OPML namespace or use separately for a pure list.
(BTW- if anyone reading this knows – how are images handled in OPML?).