I'm here live at the OPML Meetup in New York City and Dave Winer is demoing the advances in his OPML tool.

Right now we've covered:
* Using OPML to update weblogs.
* Subscription lists (yes, it reads all forms of RSS, and even Atom). Makes a damn fast news aggregator!
* Building standard OPML lists and Dave has talked about the basis of his "World Directory" concept.
* We're now seeing how building of lists automatically gets translated into a web-based directory.
* Shared Outlines. This seems to have a definite benefit for the Podcasting community. Interestingly enough, it seems that iPodder's OPML directory is done by hand. With this tool, the Podcast community could essentially share nodes seemlessly, and if you're part of the OPML "Buddylist" you can see others in your workgroup's nodes, and see exactly when they're updated.

I'm particularly interested in how it affects Podcasting which we are learning OPML will benefit greatly (and has already). OPML is all about publishing, just like RSS was developed for publishing. And it's all very much blank-slate stuff, right now all the ideas and possiblities are up in the air. But the benefits to this are absolutely felt by everyone in this room. So we shall see what the future holds in terms of OPML and Podcasting (and everything else that will grow from this).

I've signed up to beta this new tool and hopefully we can learn more about what's possible with this, and how it can add to the growth of the Podcasting medium.