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How do we get back?

Reading Continental drift by Jon Udell:

The web of the late 90s was a cornucopia of wonder, delight, and inspiration. So was the blogosophere (sic) of the early 2000s. I know a lot of us are nostalgic for those eras, and depressed about how things have turned out. The bad is really quite bad, and sometimes I feel like there’s no way forward.

Also recently on HN: Turn to RSS Feeds to Regain Control of the World Wide Web (too often Hacker News comments are even more interesting than the story).

There’s a good summary at the Wikipedia, with some notes on current usage (all negative, btw).

Summing up:

  • RSS is not dead, but is not fashionable (and arguably, it has seen better times).
  • Social media is hostile, and major sites such as Twitter and Facebook have removed (or reduced) their support; some of them never supported it.
  • All major browsers have removed RSS support (IE still supports it out of the box; and Firefox, champion of the Open Web dropped support of RSS in Firefox 64).
  • All the problems it had, are still there (probably for another post).

Although I like Udell post and his optimism because we still have the Internet, and despite how things are going and “we’ll figure it out”, I feel something must change if we want to get back to that cornucopia of wonder, delight, and inspiration (and I want the blogosphere back!).

As bonus: in defense of RSS by Seth Godin, written 10 years ago and updated just recently. Still as relevant now as it was back then, if not more.

Would you like to discuss the post? You can send me an email!