The latest excitement over at Userland has been Instant Outlining.  The term is a play on the term Instant Messenging (IM).  With IM, one can exchange messages with other people online.  The conceit behind I/O is "what if instead of just exchanging a series of text messages, what if we can send each other entire outlines?"  Those of us who have been avid users of outlines might immediately appreciate the idea.  I myself use Ecco Pro, my favorite program.  With an outliner, I can quickly write out and organize a lot of thoughts and information -- and organize them in a rich hierarchical context.  Indeed, I usually do a lot of thinking and writing first in Ecco and then translate the outlines into text.  But sometimes the outlines themselves are basically clear in and of themselves and could be published on the Web -- if only I didn't have to take the next steps of doing the outline to HTML translation.

Instant Outlining in Radio is supposed to ease that transition.  One can make an outline in Radio that gets transparently saved to the hard drive and then streamed up to one's Radio blog.  But the big deal comes with the ability to share outlines and include (or "transclude") other people's outlines into one's own.  One can "subscribe" to other people's outlines (which then get added to one's own buddy list -- parallel to buddy lists in IM).  When a person's outline changes, you are notified.  The idea is that one can be narrating one's work in this outline and then with close-to-zero effort notify others of this work.

This is my quick explanation.  For a much better one, I recommend reading Jon Udell's new article on I/O

I also have an Instant Outline.  There are different ways to interact with it.  You can look at the raw XML representation of my outline (the outline is in the OPML format).  This format is useful to software that is programmed to work with OPML, such as Radio and Manila.  For instance, if you are running Radio, you can subscribe to my outline (i.e., add me to your Radio buddy list) but clicking on this Subscribe to Raymond Yee's Instant Outline link, which would be equivalent to the iconic representation common on Radio blogs today, the OPML coffee mug:

For those of you who don't use Radio but are using a web browser, you can look at my outline as HTML.  Here I show two ways of producing HTML from my outline:

• HTML, rendered using Joshua Allen's OPML XSLT and the W3C XSLT service
• HTML, rendered using Sjoerd Visscher's OPML renderer