PowerPoint to OPML

Interesting. Came across Charlie Wood's post this morning about a new service called opmlworkstation.com.

Jim Moore's RSS Labs is the team is behind the new venture (the same crew behind opmlsearch.com):

"Why convert PowerPoint into OPML?

My own rationale is that OPML can be a used as a universal knowledge format. OPML features outines in an open format that can be indexed, searched , shared, combined, and written and read with free tools.

PowerPoint is the most widely-used format for knowledge representation, especially in business and in universities, but .ppt files are difficult to index, search, share, and combine.
We can disseminate knowledge by converting it from PowerPoint into OPML, and making it accessible to the entire web world community through shared datasets and public directories and indexes."

I've played just a little this morning and created this opml file from a test ppt. deck I created. I'll have to play more when I get the time, but this new service and OPML in general seems to have excited ex-Newsgator Charlie Wood:

"Until last week, I was totally unconvinced that OPML was interesting. To me, it wasn't much more than a loosely-defined XML format for keeping track of feed subscriptions. But after a few hours with Jim I had become a convert.

I now see OPML as a way to build and share dynamic views onto sets of distributed, dynamic content. This is a hugely powerful idea, and is applicable to any application that deals with data from multiple sources, which is to say almost all of them."