I am trying out Dialog, the Android app for micro.blog, seems to be working well, can monitor the timeline and respond to posts..

Is there a RSS revival going on?

Earlier this week, Taylor Lorenz, staff writer for The Atlantic on Internet culture, posted this on Twitter: (UPDATE 12/17/2018: Twitter post was deleted, here are links to Google search cache and offline copy)

Is there any good way to follow writers on a bunch of diff websites, so anytime they post a story I see a link or something in a single feed?

This resulted in a series of over 40 replies with recommendations for feed reader apps and generally using RSS. I added my own reply for rivers of news.

Next, a post from Cal Newport (saw this via Brad Enslen):

As any serious blog consumer can attest, a carefully curated blog feed, covering niches that matter to your life, can provide substantially more value than the collectivist ping-ponging of likes and memes that make up so much of social media interaction.

Wow! This from a person who acknowledges that he does not participate on social networks, but lets it slip that he uses RSS!

Case in point: I’ve never had a social media account, and yet I constantly enjoy connecting to people, and posting and monitoring information using digital networks.

Finally, Brad Enslen has a series of posts dealing with blogging, social media and RSS:

What do you think?

A podcast about microblogging

I have created a podcast which is linked to this post (about 4 minutes long) discussing some recent microblogging experiences of mine, and I refer to a “secret project” related to microblogging – take a listen and see if you want to participate (tease!)…

@Ron @JohnPhilpin this is a test status post from my WordPress blog, see if you can reply to this post in micro.blog, thanks.

Getting some traction on micro.blog

I made a post on Sunday, and it triggered a nice stream of comments from people on micro.blog, all of which appeared as comments on my post. Cool! It looks like the webmention support on both ends is working well. As another step in WordPress/micro.blog integration, I am adding my comments RSS feed as a cross-posted feed. After I post this, I will add a comment and see if that appears on micro.blog. Let’s see what happens!

Bryan Alexander: I Defy The World and Go Back to RSS – Bryan describes how he return to using a RSS reader (although he describes the Digg Reader, which has shut down). I use River5 from Dave Winer with a single page app for reading my feeds.

Aaron Davis: Laying the standards for a blogging renaissance – Chris Aldrich also replies

Chris Aldrich: Plans and Thoughts for IndieWeb Summit – Chris’ ideas for sessions and what he wants to do at IndieWeb Summit.

Aral Balkan: Reclaiming RSS – how to make your RSS feed more visible.

Why praise Micro.blog?

My friend, John Philpin, responded (https://beyondbridges.net/2018/06/in-praise-of-micro-blog/) to my question about using Micro.blog (what makes it more than just another blogging service), and to me his response in a nutshell is “community”. One of the features of Micro.blog is the ability to find other Micro.blog users using the Discover /Users page (https://micro.blog/discover/users), then to “follow” them after selecting a user (a la Twitter), then seeing the posts of those users in the Timeline (a la Twitter), being able to respond quickly to them (a la Twitter), and creating Mentions by using the username of the user (a la Twitter). To me, this is the “killer feature” of Micro.blog. The posting abilities are pretty standard (editing, linking, etc.).

Perhaps another “killer feature” is that the Micro.blog staff perform curation and enforce community guidelines (http://macgenie.micro.blog/2018/04/10/a-guide-to.html), which results in higher signal-to-noise ratio for postings and conversations. I started this year with a goal of making some type of post every day, even if it was just a link. That lasted about six weeks, so I am trying to “get back in the saddle again” through this post.

I tend to use RSS for tracking posts of people I am interested in (my reading list page (http://readinglist.andysylvester.com/) is an example), and then engage as I see interesting posts. I can follow the posters at Micro.blog through RSS, and do follow a few people I know (John Philpin, Ron Chester, Frank McPherson). Sometimes I feel my reading time is limited, and this reading list gives me a single place to go to follow the people that interest me.

So, should I praise Micro.blog? As a service, it is still somewhat new. However, it appears to have attracted a number of followers, and has a possibly sustainable business model through hosting support. I think it deserves the opportunity to demonstrate how blogging can facilitate community through services paid for by users, and welcoming those (like myself) who are posting from afar…