Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

Dave Winer announces the end of share.opml.org. share.opml.org was a service that allowed you to upload your reading list in OPML format (or point to an OPML file in the web) in order to find out what people with similar reading habits were recommending, to find out the most read feeds and the people who subscribe to the highest number of feeds (I never made it to the top 10 in this list).

I was using the service in two ways: one the one hand, Blogbridge allows me to export my reading list as a shared OPML file available in the web, so I just pointed share.opml.org to the OPML file generated by Blogbridge service in order to get an always-up-to-date reading list. On the other hand, I subscribed to the top-100 feeds reading list generated by share.opml.org, which is the aggregation of the most relevant blogs according to their number of readers.

Needless to say, I really regret the end of this service as it provided a vendor-neutral way of attention aggregation.

The term "free-form collaboration" is heard quite often these days, but still there it is not made clear what free-form collaboration is and why it is more important today than ever.

Free-form collaboration means that team members are not bound to typical transactional workflow process like managing a customer's request, but instead that they are seen as rational and responsible adults who need freedom to work creatively, to innovate, to design and to invent that can find their own workflow of dealing with tasks, in which order, in which way, with which priority.

Being a creative knowledge worker means that the same path can hardly be gone twice because every creative challenge is a new one. As a result, no strict and fixed workflow processes should be enforced, because they are not able to deal with the exceptions as intelligent humans are (and these exceptions happen all the time).

But free-form collaboration means more: It means freedom to work with the best team members for a job, regardless of department or company affiliations, regardless of city or country of origin. It means freedom in place of collaboration, some knowledge workers prefer to work from home or a café instead of their office. Do not force them into places where they are unproductive.

For more information, see the entry "What is free form collaboration" in my collection of "elements of collaboration".

Gaurav Oberoi of Billmonk just commented on the entry How to manage book lending and borrowing web-2.0-style? that Billmonk now features public library sharing. More details can be found at the billmonk weblog.

Of all three applications (Billmonk, LibraryThing and Stuffopolis), Billmonk is the most polished one and the one I'd like to use for borrowing and lending books, but when it comes to social application features like tagging and finding taste neighbors, LibraryThing is clearly superior.

There is one important feature I am still missing from the Billmonk website: It is an RSS feed of recent changes made to my library. Together with my friend's libraries this can be aggregated into a common library feed for a team.

In response to my yesterdays post How to manage book lending and borrowing web-2.0-style? Nicolas Delsaux recommends LibraryThing. The beta geek in me registered at this service and from what I have seen, it looks good. The web design is not 1997-style, you have proper tagging, it is easy to find readers who have very similar reading lists and the other user who has exactly the same book as you. It supports many data sources, among them the amazons, the library of congress and other libraries.

Another nice feature is the bookshelf view to your book list, which is almost what I had in mind when I wished an Javascript-resizable Bookshelf view. Unfortunately there is no lending/borrowing feature in this application, which makes it hard to use for my purposes.

"The Library"
Originally uploaded by The Department.

I've been looking for an web application to manage my book collection and to keep track of lending and borrowing. So far I have been looking at:

• Ning's Bookshelf, which looks nice, but has no lending support


• Billmonk, which has no support for making your library world-visible and is limited to 99 items.


• Stuffopolis, which does not look at nice, but it has a public page for my books, offers tracking of my books via google maps and supports delicious library imports

But I still see some space for improvements for this service:

1. Revamp the tagging interface to look more like del.ico.us


2. Have AJAX autocompletion support when adding items. The first datasource to query would be the database of books already added by other members


3. Integrate with Rapleaf to keep track of a borrower's reputation.


4. Create an AJAX-resizeable view of the bookshelf like Delicious Library offers


5. Offer last.fm-like recommendations for interesting books based on shelf similarity


6. Integrate with online shops: If I am looking for a book, I will first query my Stuffopolis neighborhood if this book is available for borrowing, if not there will be links to amazon.(com|de)


7. Provide a Greasemonkey script that will do the reverse for amazon.(com|de). If I am about to buy a book there, notify me if this book is available in my neighborhood.


8. Allow me to find possible lenders or borrowers based on location, similar interest, and degree of conectivity (like openBC or linkedIn)

Update: Another improvement would be the integration of Google Calenadar to remind me and my friends of the return date for books and other borrowed items.
Another Update: I've added a follow up: Managing Book Lists - Part II and Billmonk with public library.

Today I read about a new, excitying service that allows you to upload your OPML files (list of RSS subscriptions or reading lists) and compare your subscriptions to similar subscription lists by other people, allows to find out what are the feeds most people are subscribed to and who are the people that subscribe to the most feeds.

The service is Share Your OPML by Dave Winer, and it is exciting, but not new. It is just a relaunch of an at least two-years old, but nevertheless cool service. It will be interesting to see how this service evolves as OPML becomes increasingly popular and more feed readers like Blogbridge are starting to support it in an intelligent way.

• Top 100 Feeds
• Most prolific subscribers (I'm currently rank no. 70)

What I am really missing is a recommendation feature like last.fm's recommendations that are generated from my musical neighborhood by analyzing the x people with the most similar subscription lists and recommending all feeds that I am not subscribed to.