We need better metadata on RSS feeds. Maybe something like Wikipedia for feeds where we fill in missing data. Better descriptions of what's in the feed. Who writes, what they write about. Something like Metacritic.#Twitter — ads that lead to the paywall of a publication are mean and stupid. They managed to convince us to buy their product, but they won't sell it to us. It's as if you go to the supermarket and want to buy some apples but they will only sell you a truckload of apples, not one or two.#
Twitter tip from Andy Piper. If all you have is the ID of a tweet, how to get its url? If you look at a Twitter url, there's a screenname in there. So how do you find the name of the person who posted tweet whose id is 1574769537244958720. Turns out you don't have to. Make up a name like mamamia, and form the url like this. It'll find the tweet for you and redirect to the actual users screen name. Nice little hack. #
When a reporter starts thinking of themselves as a player that's time to resign and run for office or get hired onto the staff of one of the companies or people they report on. In other words, get in the game, honestly.#
It's great that Substack has a new simple browser-based reader. Feedly might be too much for a new feed user. And Substack comes with a lot of news sources already programmed in. If I were in charge of Feedly, I'd do a "lite" product that's free, does everything Substack's reader does, includes all the Substack feeds. And of course the upgrade to the full Feedly would be easy. Substack is going down the same path we went down with Radio UserLand in 2002. It does both reading and writing. That's a big deal.#