I believe that we are the curators of the web. #weblogpomo2024
@bjhess Thanks for a great article! I've been blogging since 2005 and followed independent bloggers for years before that.
But here's my problem. I work in the arts, which is an industry where many of the important discussions are happening on Facebook. I have over 3200 friends there (~2500 of whom are musicians), and the algorithm surfaces genuinely engaging content that has real relevance to both my immediate circle of friends and important discussions within the industry that aren't happening elsewhere. Since I've been posting relatively regularly since 2008, the algorithm seems to be surfacing my own content on other people's feeds quite regularly. I'm trying to maintain a presence on my independent blogs alongside activities on Facebook, but it's always an uphill battle.
@chrisfoley That is a challenge! Mostly I think it's good that you are having a positive experience and it's definitely okay to accept that! Do I wish it all could have been enabled on the open web? Yep! But it might be true that we needed the walled gardens to show what was possible before we could bring that to the open web. Now we know what we gained and lost in the walled gardens and maybe we can collectively figure out how to bring the gains to the open web? I hope so!!
Resurfacing is interesting. We talk a lot about resurfacing our own content–there are plugins on MB to do that. I hope there is potential for us to collectively resurface posts from around the web in this way as well. (I sometimes see that happening organically on Hacker News, for instance.)
@bjhess an interesting concept in this same vein from Christina Warren during the Micro Camp chat with Manton and Jean just now: if podcasts are just audio RSS feeds, why don't we have a Podcasts-style app for blogs? A big library everyone can add their feeds to, with categories and a curation layer to help people find the blogs they want to subscribe to via RSS.
@adam 🤔
I do feel in general that blogs are not nearly as categorizable as podcasts. Most podcasts have a particular focus. Most blogs, in my experience, are all over the place (in a good way!). Though there are certainly enough specific, focused blogs to make a corpus in any category.
Podcast discovery is interesting. I don't generally browse in an app to discover podcasts. I guess I just…hear about them from other people? Or go searching the web for them? Come to think of it, after our trip to Japan I looked for Japanese history podcasts and…I don't remember where I ended up discovering what I discovered. Maybe I did search in Overcast!
@bjhess Resurfacing is exactly what makes the open web superior to all closed systems! The fatal flaw of Facebook and others is that although there is all sorts of new relevant content surfaced via tha algorithm, it's next to impossible to find older content more than a few days old.
@chrisfoley Heh, for sure. Countless times my wife has said, "I saw this thing on Facebook earlier today, let me find it." The algorithm has whisked it away that point, and only if she remembers exactly who posted thing can she find it again after a bunch of digging.