Blogosphere v2.0?

"Blogosphere", that's a rarely used word from the past, as in 10 to 15 years ago.

Dave Winer's Jan 26, 2016 blog post titled Booting up a fresh blogosphere

My recent piece, Anywhere But Medium, has gotten a fair amount of play.

The Indieweb group has been championing this idea for a few years now. DW might be a little late to catch on, but because he has a large audience of readers, he can spread the concepts.

For some reason, DW does not write about the Indieweb. I think that he dislikes the group because the Indieweb prefers Microformats over RSS. I agree with DW on this. I like Microformats, but I'll stick with using RSS for feeds. The second choice would be a JSON format.

Putting the feed debate aside, the Indieweb has produced many other positive ideas, such as Webmentions, that DW should investigate and maybe contribute to.

More from DW:

Anyway, there is probably enough agreement "out there" to create a critical mass for a newly invigorated blogosphere to boot up along the lines of the one that started this whole thing in the late 90s to early 2000s. What we need is a little new technology, and support from one or two vendors.

New technology?

... have WordPress accept as input, the URL of a JSON file containing the source code for a post, and then do its rendering exactly as if that post had been written using WordPress's editor. That would give us exactly what we need to have the best of all worlds. Widespread syndication and control over our own writing and archive. All at a very low cost in terms of storage and CPU.

I don't understand. If I have my own website, why would I need to syndicate to Wordpress.

Many Indieweb users post to their own domain name, and then their software uses hooks and bridges to syndicate their content to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., and then the interactions, such as shares, replies, etc., on those social media sites come back to the personal site of the Indieweb user.

It appears that the Indieweb user is actually using Twitter directly, but that's not the case. The user is "using" the other social media sites from their own personal website.

Syndication bridges to the silos already exist for Indieweb users. I don't use those social media sites because I use my 13-year-old message board ToledoTalk.com for discussions.

Therefore, I don't need to syndicate elsewhere. I'm only interested in discussions at TT. I'm not interested in discussions elsewhere about what I post here at JotHut.com and on my other personal publishing sites.

The only discussion mechanism that interests me is Webmentions.

Just want to put this idea out there for people who are thinking about this stuff. APIs are not necessary. Just a new syndication format. We could even use an existing format, but since we're mostly working in JavaScript these days, I think JSON is also a fine way to go.

JSON is language agnostic. It may have begun under JavaScript, but I use Perl to send JSON to a CouchDB server that's written in Erlang.