Again, Dave Winer says that he is “building around WordPress to create a social network based on RSS”. To date, his teases indicate he is building only a “feed reader” experience. To me, social networks imply being able to communicate with others. Where’s the beef? Show it to us!

Taking another look at social networks and RSS

Today, Dave Winer wrote “What if you made a social network out of RSS?”. He then basically described a feed reader interface, and used examples from Bluesky and Twitter. However, I think that an important point of what people think of as “social networks” was overlooked or omitted. If you look at the Bluesky/Twitter examples, you can see that someone posts, and then replies are shown. I do not think that the “timeline viewer” that Dave Winer is “teasing” in recent posts is going to show or allow replies. The development of WordLand and its Baseline theme does not support comments or replies.

During the development of MyStatusTool, my collaborator Colin Walker proposed a namespace to allow replies via RSS. Perhaps this could be a stepping stone to supporting replies, and therefore conversations, via RSS. Just having a feed reader isn’t having a conversation, and isn’t particularly social. For other tools in this space, see my site The Feed Network.

A question about rssCloud on WordPress.com

I have been trying to troubleshoot a problem with subscribing to RSS feeds from WordPress.com sites on my rssCloud blog tool MyStatusTool. I decided to use a rssCloud test app from Andrew Shell, and was able to set it up and run it successfully. I did a week-long test to see if I could detect posts from seven WP.Com sites, and it worked (see log file here). This weekend, I realized that the app did not re-subscribe to any of the feeds, but still remained active, receiving notifications from the subscribed blogs for over a week. This seems to be in conflict with the rssCloud walkthrough page, which states that a feed must be re-subscribed every 24 hr. Does anyone know anything about this?

I recently went on a trip where I was going to fly over the body of water south of Texas. The pilot correctly identified the body of water as “the Gulf of Mexico”. Nice!

Shouldn’t RSS feeds have link URLs?

An interesting note – I wanted to link to the entry at links.daveverse.org for a particular link. I went to the site, did not see an easy way, so I went to the RSS feed linked at the bottom of the site. To my surprise, the feed listed items pointing to the links.daveverse.org item, but that item did not have the URL related to that item. I finally found them at https://dave.linkblog.org/. However, this seems to be at odds with Dave Winer’s own description of what a linkblog feed should be – what’s up with that?

Quanta Magazine: When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History – a fascinating article of interviews with over 20 people in the field of NLP

Quanta Magazine: At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery (via links.daveverse.org)

Coyote: You Can Make A Website – one page guide – cool! (via Joe Jennett)

HTML for People: Site that takes you through how to create a web site and more (via Indieseek.xyz)

Use case: linkblogging as curation

I have experimented with several methods of curating links:

Zettlekasten/directory of links organized by categories (used Drummer, created a OPML file, rendered by the “this.how” feature within Drummer)
Website using categories (used Hugo, with Fluency theme, each link had a page, used tags for classification)
WordPress (used Links category to collect just links)

My struggle is – am I just collecting stuff? This article talks about how to break that cycle, I should read it again….