RSS is kind of an invisible technology. People call RSS dead because you can’t see it. There’s no feed, no login, no analytics. RSS feels subsurface.

Come to think of it - all the interesting bits of blogging are invisible. The discussion has moved to Twitter, or discords, or DMs. Trackbacks aren’t a thing anymore. So when you see someone blogging all you see is the blog post. The branching replies and conversations are either invisible or hard to track down.

But I believe we’re living in a golden age of RSS. Blogging is booming. My feed reader has 280 feeds in it.

How do we increase the surface area of RSS and blogging?

I think there’s something quietly radical about making your feed reader open by default. It increases the surface area of RSS so others can discover content more easily. It makes blogging more visible.

The nice thing about RSS and OPML is that’s a very extensible spec. The file format is flexible, you can define your own schema and fields. This might open up new kinds of publishing.