I don't just write about the reinvention of RSS, I'm working on it. 

As with all things web, and all things RSS, it has a single unifying design principle -- loosely-coupled. 

Loose-coupledness is a very key idea. For example, the roads I drive on with my car are loosely-coupled from the car. I might drive a SmartCar, a Toyota or a BMW. No matter what car I choose I am free to drive on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Sixth Avenue or the Bay Bridge. 

Anyway, I wanted to revisit blogging tools in light of all that we now know about blogging, which is a lot more than we knew the first few times around, in the mid-90s to the early 00s. 

Here's what I came up with. A tool whose only output is a set of RSS feeds. You can have as many as you want. When you want to create a new post, go to the editor website possibly using a bookmarklet that copies the selected text, title and link from the page you're coming from. Enter (or edit) the body of the post, and optionally a title and a link, to correspond to the three main elements of an RSS item. You can also link to an enclosure. Click Post and the new item is added to the feed and the feed is published. A realtime notification, via rssCloud, goes out to all who have requested realtime notification.  

Here's a screen shot of the prototype of this tool. 

You can see an array of previous posts, each with an Edit link next to it. Click the link, and the title, link and description fill the edit area. Make your changes, click Save and the result goes back out to the feed.  

Now, one of the apps that subscribes to the feed could be an agent that posts the new items and updated items to your blog. Or it could post the new item to Twitter or Facebook. Or to whatever new corporate blogging silo is popular next year or the year after. The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure. You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place. 

This is a piece of the loosely-coupled system I envision booting up over the next months and years. 

PS: People who are familiar with Radio 8 will see the obvious resemblance.  

PPS: The name, my.reallysimple.org, evokes (for me at least) the obsession of Gollum in Lord of the Rings, who spoke lovingly of the ring as My Precious.