Use case: linkblogging from your phone

I use my RSS reading app to graze stories from the feeds I am following. After scrolling through the list, I have a set of browser tabs open to read. After reading, usually I have several tabs (or perhaps a lot of tabs) for which I would like to save the links. Many times in the past, I have copied them to a “link dump” file. However, another approach is to use a linkblogging tool to capture the links.

My tool of choice in this situation is MyStatusTool (my live version is here). Here is a screenshot from my phone browser:

The area above the “post your update” button is the text area to enter a post. MyStatusTool uses the medium-editor toolbar to make it easy to add a link. The most difficult thing is to select the link text and get the medium-editor toolbar to appear (usually I double-tap the text). It is also best to only link to a single word (again, selecting several words as the link text can be difficult). The tool also creates a view of user posts, so you can review just your posts and not all of the content from subscribed feeds.

If anyone is interested in installing MyStatusTool, let me know! More information is available at The Feed Network.

More on linkblogging

Frank McPherson wrote this week on the subject of linkblogging, looking at how RSS can be used to share. I liked his perspective on how linkblogs can be useful in a web browser, while just having a RSS-feed linkblog requires a feed reader. Both of these types of sharing are supported on the Web – diversity in action!

Some thoughts on linkblogging

As I have written in the past week, I have a number of linkblogs and linkblog sites:

I have used different tools for these sites, but I consider all of them to be linkblogs of one kind or another. Many people have linkblogs. However, this week, Dave Winer says that he “had to do a definitive linkblog“. Really? Like there is such a thing. Is there a “definitive blog”? Dave has commented on how people should not start a group “whose name says you own the future of something that is open” (podcasting), or what constitutes the open social web. Please – let’s have a little humility here. Linkblogs are everywhere and have lots of variety, just like regular blogs. No need to add the adjective “definitive” here…

More discussion on “Inbound RSS” and “Outbound” RSS

Dave Winer writes today about the Open Social Web, and puts forward a solution on “linking the collection of social twitter-like sites into a real honest to goodness open social web”:

  • Add inbound RSS feeds. The social site allows a user to specify an RSS feed that represents their posts. When a new one shows up, it appears in the timelines of people who are following the user. They can add items to that feed however they like. It can come from anywhere. That’s 1/2 of “open.”#
  • Add outbound RSS feeds. This gives you the other half. When a new item shows up in a users feed, however it got there, it appears in their outbound feed, which can be tied into the input feed of one or more other sites. #
  • Support links in users’ posts. You really can’t claim to be part of the web if you don’t implement this core feature of the web. #

Is this something of a shift from what Dave has written in the past? Let’s take a look back…

In April 2025, Dave wrote:

Feed readers view RSS as inbound, and blogging tools regard it as outbound. Same feed, different contexts. Like trains going in and out of a station. Inbound and outbound. 

I responded with my take shortly after that:

As far as I know, the only service/tool that takes a RSS feed as an input and allows users to publish based on the content of that RSS feed is the Micro.blog service. 

So far, looks the same to me. Perhaps the way to probe further is to create some use cases. Say a person is using OpenSocialTool, they can subscribe to feeds from other people (not necessarily on OpenSocialTool), and they can create posts with OpenSocialTool, and those posts are included in a feed to which other users can subscribe. This is a good description of MyStatusTool (see demo version here).

Now, let us say that BlueMastoThread lets users specify feeds from others that they want to follow (inbound RSS) and displays the content of those feeds in BlueMastoThread, and the user can create an outbound feed of this aggregated content (outbound RSS). In addition, the user can create posts in BlueMastoThread and have those posts appear in their outbound feed, or maybe a separate outbound feed, I don’t know (outbound RSS). I think this use case describes the situation that Dave Winer talks about in his post today (inbound RSS can be an input into outbound RSS), which is a little different from most, if not all, blogging/social tools today. I do not think that there is any tool available today that implements this use case, but maybe there is, and I just don’t know about it.