He calls the idea 'The World Outline.'

Ooooh. I remember this. This is the idea that spawned / grew out of node types.

If I was going to hazard a guess as to what the new idea looks like, I would say that it looks like an outline. And when you expand a node on the outline to see the children, it fetches OPML from some remote source.

I'm doing a horrible job of explaining what is going on.

The cool part, and the bomb that's going off in my mind right now, is that you can connect ANYTHING up with this world outline, as long as it formats its result as OPML. Is there something you want to monitor? Give it a method that renders output as OPML and tie it in with the outline.

Even better than that -- I'll bet there's a defined RPC API that allows discovery and fetching of the OPML. All you have to do is make an outline in Radio, define a few headlines as links that point to the OPML resource, and there you go. 2clicking on the headline fetches the OPML.

John Robb says here that this new feature "decreased the flow to my e-mail inbox by over 100 items a day." Since John Robb would probably get most of his email from internal UserLand sources as status reports and the like, I would bet that UserLand developers all have outlines that they edit to reflect their current status, and Mr. Robb has an outline of links to those status outlines. To check the status of a person, open his node. His current status outline will show up, and there you go.

But Dave also talks about direct communication. So I wonder if the chat application that he did with the Radio 7.0 app shows up here. It turned up in the original PlayList stuff -- you could look at all of the current users, view any information they'd made public (as described in the previous paragraph), and you could chat with someone by right-clicking on the user node.

But it's probably different and better than all of that. All I know is that I'm anxious to see what's coming next. It's always exciting.

Now I want to start putting OPML front ends on everything I do.

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