Some while ago I talked about the facility for users to share topics with each other.  I was just beginning to experiment with topics and blogging and, at the time, was thinking of an ad hoc P2P mechanism by which users could ensure they were talking about the same thing by using the same topics.  I called this concept a topicroll playing on the theme of the blogroll.

More recently Paolo and I have been working on making use of topics to create a superior Action Journalling environment.  Paolo has also been involved in the Italian Blog Aggregator project about which he has written on several occasions.  These efforts have begun to dovetail and I wanted to document some of what we are doing.

For a while now liveTopics has provided the ability for Radio users to associate multiple topics with their posts.  This allows for fine-grained, ad hoc, associations between posts in a much more flexible way than categories allow.  Release 1.1.3 (due RSN) adds also the concept of topic types and these are central to our efforts.

liveTopics types are a way of classifying topics into functional categories.  For example the default types created by liveTopics are:

• generic
• person
• project
• place
• time

Each topic can belong to only one type (which defaults to generic).  Now my topic Paolo can be classified as being a person topic.  Now all topics are not equal and our software can start to provide useful interfaces based upon topic information.

Systems such as the Italian Blog Aggregator may want to define a control language for topics rather than allowing users to make up their own.  Even if it does not wish to control the topics, it may be useful if users can pre-fill their topic list with system defined topics.  That's what the topicroll is all about.  Now we're going to implement it.

To begin with we have choosen to use the OPML format for the topic roll (later on we will probably implement them in XTM as well).  Whilst OPML is not a semantically ideal language for describing a topic roll it has a number of advantage for us right now:

• It's simple: It basically has only 1 tag <outline> so it's pretty easy to get along with
• It's a standard: OPML is already used & understood around the world, we're not inventing it ourselves
• There are tools: In principle you should be able to create a topic roll in any OPML editor and load it into liveTopics and vice versa

As an example you can see my current topicroll for yourself (although I notice that Radio doesn't seem to make anything of it, I wonder if my OPML is bad).

[28/03: With a little help from Paolo the topicRoll OPML is now fixed and the outline works in Radio!]

The next step is to allow liveTopics to import topicrolls from other locations.

Creating change.

From Dave Pollard's excellent new blog, How to Save the World, comes a piece of advice that could be helpful for people who want to effect change in just about any sphere of activity. It also hints at the challenge inherent in such an agenda.

[...] Change Management is all about getting people to do different things, or things differently. In business, the guru of the moment on this subject is John Kotter. In his book Leading Change he describes the eight steps to getting people to do different things or things differently, and they are irrefutable:

1. Establish a sense of urgency
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition
3. Create a vision
4. Communicate the vision
5. Empower others to act on the vision
6. Plan for and create short-term wins
7. Consolidate improvements 
8. Institutionalize the change

The underlying principle here is that, in business as in real life, you don't bring about sustained, meaningful change by edict. You need to persuade, enthuse, and engage people in sufficient numbers to change behaviours, laws or processes. If you want to do this in your business, buy Kotter's book, since that's what it's focused on. But the same preconditions apply to political, economic, artistic, scientific, spiritual or moral change. Whether the change agent is a preacher or a politician or a philosopher or a post-modernist, the process is the same. [...]

[Seb's Open Research]

Kotter's to do: list is remarkably succinct.  This could be a manifesto for anybody at work (which reminds me of Gary Hamel's assertion, I think in Leading the Revolution, that we can all be leaders, whatever our station).