The Fever is hooking us up with the Robots for lunch (the Common Craft Gnomedex BBQ is later). I imagine we'll talk about lists, especially the stuff that Microsoft is cooking up.

I think lists are cool. People (you know, the regular type people in your life), really, really like making lists. They like rating things, too, but I think lists can probably do that too.

Unordered lists are good for passing around stuff. But stuff with some structure to it. I could make a list called "My Grocery List" and you can have a pretty good guess that all the things it contains are grocery items. Or "Places to visit in my neighbourhood" would be a list of, well, places.

Ordered lists (like 1 - 10, etc.) give you some rating info as well as a list of structured stuff. I could make a list called "Favourite places in my neighbourhood", and order them (rank them, rate them) from 1 - 10. If we used a common source of places, and aggregated the ordering/ranking/rating across all lists, we could have meta-lists that show favourite places for all people.

OPML does lists pretty well -- I've attached an OPML file containing pointers to all the Robot Co-Op blogs. Neat.