Ash Huang & Ryan Putnam on a microsite:

For the month of January, we’ll make a pact to blog a few times to get into the habit, and create a directory of all the creators who participate. Readers can then find new makers to follow before we all scatter to the winds. Win-win!

I’m all about blogging, obviously. Do their challenge!

But also.

I wonder if the term “blog” has too much baggage. Too much history for it to really catch on again and make a dent.

Maybe “publish your own feed” is a better framing. “Own your RSS.” A feed doesn’t care what it contains. It is content-style agnostic. It’s just timestamped HTML, in a way. Put some audio in it, and it’s a podcast. A feed could be exactly what you would have tweeted before tweeting became cringe.

I’m starting to see this a little, and I like it. For example, Adam Argyle’s site is essentially a feed of tweets. If you like the format of any particular social media site, your feed can copy that format. Acceptable and encouraged.

Any template-powered site-building software can produce an RSS feed. Loop over your most recent content and spit out feed-friendly code. Now make the feed prominent on your site so people can find it. Done! Hey CMS’s: make cool-looking templates that encourage publishing unique types of feeds. Think photo-of-the-day-with-caption. Think that-old-140-character-arbitrary-limit. Think dream-journal. Think list-of-the-day.

Making a dent then is a two-parter:

1. You (and everybody) start publishing a feed, and don’t be shy about it.
2. You (and everybody) make reading feeds one of your primary modes of content consumption.

Doable.

Maybe, as Jacob O’Bryant suggests, we can rebuild social media on top of RSS.