Alex Barnett blog : OPML sampling

One of the nice things about sharing our OPML is the ability to sample feeds you've not tried before, but this can be hard work.

Example: Pete Cashmore and Chris Anderson (editor of Wired) have made their RSS feed subscriptions available for others to import / surf and sample. The idea is that there are some feeds I like to look of and then subscribe to these myself. In Chris' case, this is 150 separate feeds he's tracking. So for me to sample these properly it would take me at least an hour to go through each feed, find any relevant posts (to me) and then subscribe. You'd have to sample 450 of mine if you wanted to be thorough. 1,500 if Robert Scoble's. That's hard manual labour.

I find RSS fascinating, as a subset of this I have tried the OPML editor
The learning curve has been steep for me, but I'm more of a hardware geek,
not a software geek. Posting wasn't a problem for me, it was more formatting
of a "blogroll" or crude River of news, didn't work. There have been several
improvements lately that I've not had a chance to try, but look forward to
getting on the River of News bandwagon.
What is a River of news? Dave Winer explains it:

Sure sign that Rex uses a poorly designed RSS aggregator. It shouldn't make you feel guilty. You should have easy access to news, and stuff you missed while you were away is nothing more than stuff you missed. Let the news flow by you and relax like someone sitting on the bank of a river [Firefox attempts a connection, but one is not allowed here, not sure what's up, but in case you can get there, I definately wanted to post it.] looking for something interesting as you while away the time. That's how news works, and RSS is, emphatically, for news.

My first project with the OPML editor was importing my RSS feed. Sage's
export function messes with the OPML file, in a way that makes it unimportable.
I worked around that (not sure how, its been many months), then I was dragging the
feeds to different categories. I then tried to put that in my blogroll, but it didn't
work. I see more and more adoption, which leads me to believe that it is easier, or
that perhaps there is somebody who would want to use this tool, or does and has tips
and tricks?? I look forward to the time I have more opportunity to "play" with it. :)

--MissM

Another OPML guru (if I may) is Amyloo. She has an OPML blog, that is a lab to
experiment, and I enjoy observing her experiments. :)

Alex Barnett blog : OPML sampling