Today I finished reading Stephanie Booth’s three series posts on “Rebooting The Blogosphere” cited by others who I follow. In general I agree with Stephanie’s points and her description of a web reading tool that easily provides a way to create blog posts based on another post being read, create new blog posts from scratch, and convert a comment you are writing on another’s blog into a full post for your own blog. Her suggestion assumes one is reading within a RSS reader app like NetNewsWire.

Like Stephanie I would prefer less friction between reading and posting about what I am reading to my blog. The problem, however, is that most RSS feeds that I follow do not include the full content of a post. The sites that rely on advertising usually include just a link to their site or a snippet only so that you must end up going to the site to read the entire post.

I use either Feedland or River5 for two purposes, to provide me a central site to see new items published by the feeds I follow, and to triage the items I want to read at a later time. When I see something that I want to read I either right-click the title link and “send it” to Readwise Reader or I open the item in a new browser tab and then send it to Readwise, depending on whether the source site is behind a paywall.

My point is that the “reading interface” that Stephanie describes might not be an RSS aggregator like FeedLand but rather a “read it later” app like Readwise Reader. I would need Readwise to add the writing tools that would be needed to easily integrate a post that I read with a new blog post that I write.

My web reading-to-writing workflow is the following. If while I read an article I see something that I want to use for a blog post, I highlight that text in Readwise Reader and give the highlight a “blog-post” tag. All of my highlights in Readwise Reader get downloaded to Obsidian and a blog-post page shows all the tagged items and linked mentions.

When I have time I open the original post in a browser tab, my highlights in a Obsidian tab, and create a new post in a second Obsidian tab. I use the micro.publish Obsidian community plugin to publish the post to my blog.

Some times I do quickly react to something that I read on the web by writing a post using Drummer or micro.blog’s posting page, and these posts tend to be only a paragraph or two and would be the type that would benefit from the reading and writing tool Stephanie describes and what WordLand may become.