Weblogs are first of all an incredibly powerful tool to share points of view. Weblogs allow people to become richer by sharing their views on the world surrounding them and by being able to see the world with other people eyes. This can be applied to the definition of new protocols or to an ongoing war.

The huge success that weblogs are having is creating an incredible amount of information. RSS feeds and aggregators, both desktop or centralized, provide an excellent and powerful tool to keep track of all these weblogs, but at they are starting to show their limits as the number of sources increase.

Currently news distributed trough RSS feeds can be organized by author or categories, which is definetly a good way of doing that, but we believe that some alternatives might prove useful too.

Traditional media has always organized their content using topics or categories. Look at this page on the BBC site to get an idea.

Of course, since weblogs are not published by a single editor, a topics system should be flexible and dynamic eough to be usable in any situation. While, for example, a news oriented weblog could use categories similar to the traditional media ones (Art, Business, Economy, etc.), a techinical weblog could use categories much more refined: a weblog discussing scripting tecniques could for example be organized using scripting languages.

To make this approach usable there's anyway the need to be able not only to define our own categories but also to subscribe to other editors' categories listings in order to be able to synchronize our contents. This is where the topics clouds concept comes from: anyone could both choose to use somebody else categories or/and to create his own.

Topic clouds can be published trough topicRolls, such as outlined lists of topics currently described using OPML. But the ENT specification allows the use of any format, such as XTM, to describe a topic cloud.

This very first step we are doing will shortly be supported by the release of a new version of LiveTopics, which will support the standard, and followed shortly by a new Evectors application which using ENT will create dynamic directories of contents created using weblogs for intranet applications.

The ENT1.0 specification is published under a Creative Commons License, as usual, any comment, contribution or critique is very welcomed.