In between writing my articles, I thought I might try my hand at creating an OPML file. I’ve long been one to seek out conference presentations, and so decided that an updated outline of all presentations, podcasts, blogs and wikis from library conferences dating back one year would be an interesting starting point. Since this OPML reading directory largely consists of html links you will probably want to just browse it rather than subscribe to it, but if you’d like to use the OPML file, you can find it here. You can read it all in the bitty browser here. If the bitty browser is too small for you to view it in, you can view it in outline style here.

For those of you who are new to OPML files (as I was last week), an OPML file is simply an outline, or reading list which can contain RSS feeds and html links, as well as links to audio and video files. When you subscribe to an OPML file, any and all changes which are made by the file’s author will then be updated in your news reader. At this point OPML files can only be subscribed to through Blogbridge and Newsriver newsreaders, although you can import an OPML file into Bloglines.

Thus far there are two types of OPML lists emerging; the reading list which consists optimally of between 2 and 10 RSS feeds or links which are recommended for a topic, and the reading directory which strives to provide a comprehensive list on a subject. Such an example is Steven Cohen’s excellent directory of Web 2.0 company blogs, or any of his PubSub directories.

As I created and tested my OPML file, I discovered that although it is easy to add plain html links to the outline, the news reader tools are primarily focused on subscriptions. As it turned out, the majority of my resources were not RSS feeds and so didn’t appear within my reader nor did they look as snazzy in the outline. Hopefully future readers will provide increased functionality for non-rss resources because this file type is a great way to gather and display resources of all different file types.