Jason Kolb recently wrote 2 articles about how he would like to be able to access his personal data the ipod-way:
“The iPod makes the music part of my life easy. The most important thing it does is make the vast amounts of music that I have accessible and useful. And this got me to thinking. A lot of what I really want to accomplish with technology runs along the same lines. I look at all the data in my life from the perspective of a business-intelligence executive, and I see giant piles of data, none of them talk to each other, and the only systems I currently have to navigate the piles are in the stone age. I want to make those data silos that make up my digital life easy to use for once.”
When reading his articles (Browsing personal data iPod-style and Flattening the Internet with a Personal Data Browser Control), the first thing that popped in my mind was ‘that’s an opml job’. The ipod way of structuring data is just plain simple outlining. I think opml could work perfect to act as a container for this personal info. It can handle links to rss, html and other xml-formats.
Which pieces could we loosely join to create such a personal data browser?
That’s such a great suggestion that I can’t believe I missed it before. There are basically two views of data that I’ve been able to boil everything down to: list data and detail data. I think OPML works beautifully for the former. I had just been spitting out list data as HTML to get around in the data, but it makes much more sense to expose it as OPML and then just use an XSLT to make it viewable in a browser. Thanks for the suggestion!