Dave posted on the RSS website about something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. What he calls “reading lists” and I prefer to think about as a new way to use OPML feeds. This proposal would change OPML from a static 1-use format to a subscription feed. Here’s a quote from Dave about the idea:

Reading lists are OPML documents that point to RSS feeds, like most of the OPML documents you find, but instead of subscribing to each feed in the document, the reader or aggregator subscribes to the OPML document itself. When the author of the OPML document adds a feed, the aggregator automatically checks that feed in its next scan, and (key point) when a feed is removed, the aggregator no longer checks that feed. THe editor of the OPML file can update all the subscribers by updating the OPML file. Think of it as sort of a mutual fund for subscriptions.

Here’s the jist of it: Some bloggers already use OPML to share the blogs they subscribe to. The problem is, in order to stay in sync, the issuer has to keep updating the file (which admitedly isn’t easy), and the reader has to keep using the new versions again and again. This new paradigm of actually subscribing to the OPML feed is a much better approach though, because the reader doesn’t need to perform any extra steps as long as the publisher has tools to automate the update process of the OPML file.

I’ve done some thinking on subscribing to a person’s reading list before with a few colleagues back in Portugal, and am planning on continuing the effort towards a simple solution to this problem. With Dave sharing the same ideas, everything is easier. Let’s see how it goes - I predict some future posts on the subject.

Yesterday we announced it, today we expand it with a heavy weight in the blogging community. Dave Winer has joined the Web 2.0 Workgroup with his TwoWayWeb weblog. Dave is a pioneer of syndication, so it’s quite an honour to have him on board of a project with such humble goals.

I would like to leave a personal note on this to thank everyone who’s been sending in their thoughts and support for the workgroup idea. We are glad to see people look at our blogs as a good source of information on the new ways of the web. Now with Dave (and a couple of other names to be announced soon), we feel this is becoming very real. Thanks for all the support.

TechCrunch and Read/WriteWeb also talk about it.

… Unless you’re going for the iMac, that is. Because the new iPod with video isn’t there. Believe me, I tried. Me and Mike (TechCrunch) read about the announcement and literally rushed out the door to the Apple store. That is, without really reading the part where they said “on sale next week”.

Good news is Apple did it. I am usually quite good with predictions but I don’t know how this one is going to play out in the videoblogging world. Still, I could say I’m excited (well, excited enough to rush out to shell off 400 bucks). Now, I’m not super excited with keeping the iPod layout - I’d love it if they had really gone video-centric and made the display horizontal and wide instead of just expanding it towards the borders.

Yesterday Yahoo! added blog search results to their news search, and some people have been talking about it (here is the TechCrunch story on it). To put it simply, it’s yet another blog search engine, so there’s not much to talk about there. What I will talk about, though, is how the results are displayed, because that’s what I’m interested on.

I see one big problem with their current approach. To put it simply: it looks like a column for ads, and that means most people will just ignore it. It’s true that once you click “more blog results”, it shows a full page listing with results, but who will click that anyway?

The truth is people get used to certain patterns: most people ignore right-hand columns that look displaced because they’ve grown used to Google AdSense. Yahoo!s Blog Search uses the same right-hand column pattern for what should be relevant results, though. This generally makes users confused. Mike at TechCrunch was maybe the first user with no usability or user experience knowledge to point out that the UI makes no sense. And he’s right.

I could see a better alternative being actually splitting the whole page in two and showing results side by side, with one side being dedicated to general websites, and the other to weblogs. This approach would give no relevance on one over the other, which is (in my own opinion) the right thing to do.

Yahoo! launching a “product” like this without carefully considering the fact that the results placement doesn’t work is unfortunate. Hopefully, they will change it when it rolls out of beta. The problem here is that the “beta” tag seems to be an excuse for skipping certain steps of the development process, and that must stop sooner or later, before users lose hope.