(2011-01-05) Winer Minimal Blogging Tool

Dave Winer is designing a new WebLog creation Platform (Blork Mark) that's more Loosely Coupled. A tool whose only output is a set of RSS feeds. You can have as many as you want. When you want to create a new post, go to the editor website possibly using a bookmarklet that copies the selected text, title and link from the page you're coming from. Enter (or edit) the body of the post, and optionally a title and a link, to correspond to the three main elements of an RSS item. You can also link to an enclosure. Click Post and the new item is added to the feed and the feed is published. A realtime notification, via RssCloud, goes out to all who have requested realtime notification... Now, one of the apps that subscribes to the feed could be an agent that posts the new items and updated items to your blog. Or it could post the new item to Twitter or FaceBook. Reminds me of Plexus, which seems to have gone dark.

Having this run on a Fat Client app is a nice architecture for keeping content in the hands of the writer (Personal Server), while pouring it into whatever medium is most amenable at the time.

Semi-related: Tantek Celik puts every Tweet on his own site, then renders it unto Twitter but with Short [[URL]] at end linking to entry on his site. (Which means he loses another 19chars if he wants to fit the whole node body into a tweet.)

• his software for running this is called Falcon. Which seems to be inching toward his vision of DiSo v2.

• Interesting discussion about UX issues on the Twitter rendering/linking.

  • Sept'2012 update: now noticed that when he includes his local-url in the tweet, he breaks it up ((ttk.me t4Km1)) so it's not actually a URL.
    • also noticed he posts sometimes to Google Plus, but that's not mirrored on his own site!

• Jeremy Keith bookmarks to his own software and then renders out to Del.icio.us.

• this approach to content Federation is now called POSSE.

Jan09 - update.

Jan11 - Kroc Carmen (and Dave) thinks that the Web Browser should be the RssAggregator. He thinks Google Reader is as vendor/advertiser-centric as Twitter and FaceBook. I think that's an awful lot to put into a Web Browser. Mozilla Raindrop? (Hmm, if it's not the Web Browser, does it need to be a Web Proxy Server so that it knows your reading history to learn from it?)

• Jan16: Dave notes that the feed-autodiscovery indicator is getting removed from the toolbar in FireFox-v4.
  • Les Orchard goes into detail on this.

Jan12 - how Dave sees Instagram fitting in to this EcoSystem.