Personal email newsletters are a trend in the right direction. They’re often the right combination of content (summarized update) and frequency (once/week). But, email doesn’t scale, in as so far as I can’t imagine subscribing to hundreds of personal newsletters.
It would be neat if there was an app where you could see summarized updates from all of the people you want to subscribe to. Building on the /now pages micro trend, each person could publish their life summary as a periodically updated /now page. The app would simply track these to let you know when someone updated their page.
“Social media for people who update infrequently.”
2 Comments
Sounds kind of like an RSS feed of post revisions with some diff-like highlighting (maybe just ins and del). I wonder how hard it would be to build that as a WP plugin?
Then again, I ache for RSS to make a comeback, so it’s currently the hammer by which I try to turn everything into a nail.
Kinda sorta. I think it’s important that
/nowfirst exists as a HTML document. With a light amount of microformat, it could probably function similarly to a RSS feed.Here’s some fun prior art in the area of diffing.
I’d think you’d want to keep it mostly vanilla HTML though (i.e. limit what the plugin does), so that the idea works with other publishing systems without too much effort.
Me too! Some day…