What is Instant Outlining?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1321

Posted by dave
2002-03-28 09:48:46

In progress.

Good morning. My name is Dave Winer. I normally write for scripting.com and various userland.com sites, but today I wanted to start a thread over here on outliners.com to talk about a new direction for outlining—the integration of outlining and the Internet.

Up until now, outliners have been used to edit documents on a local user’s hard drive. This was the model for the early outliners, ThinkTank, Ready, MORE, Acta, PC-Outline, Grandview, and for the current outliners—Java Outline Editor, Radio UserLand, and others.

On the Internet, outliners can become the basis for a powerful groupware application that I call Instant Outlining, because like instant messaging, changes percolate in real time; and because the outliner, unlike other models for desktop idea processing (spreadsheets, word processors, garphics programs, etc), is ideally suited for being collaborative document editing environment.

How it works

You have a Buddy List—people whose outlines you are subscribed to.

You also have an outline, that you edit on your local computer, that other people are subscribed to. (You can actually have many subscribable outlines, but to begin with, to keep it simple, assume you just have one.)

When one of your buddies updates his or her outline, the name of the person goes bold to indicate that there’s a new outline present.

When you change your outline and save, your name goes bold for each of the people who subscribe to your outline.

You can see a list of the people who have subscribed to your outline. Further, you can view your subscriptions in the outliner, and by double-clicking on a person who’s subscribed to your outline, you can quickly see who they’re subscribed to. This is ideal for open knowledge-management based organizations.

A search engine taps into the flow, making it easy to find what’s been posted to all subscribers’ outlines. Links to content management software is essential, so that people outside the outliner network can view the information in HTML-based Web browsers.

The applications of Instant Outlining

All the applications of Instant Outlining are workgroup applications. A group of attorneys working on a case, a group of academic researchers studying a problem, a Web development team coordinating a project.

The types of people who will use Instant Outlining are the people whose work product is thought. It’s the same market that non-Internet-aware outliners found.

UserLand started using Instant Outlining several months before the shipment of Radio 8.0 in January 2002. It immediately resulted in a tremendous boost in communication, and made it possible for the product to ship sooner; in fact it’s hard to imagine how the product would have shipped without the groupware Instant Outliner.

Screen shots

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