Suggestion for blog-based social media

Many of us write tens of thousands of words yearly. All those words are written on some corporate social media website, and they can wake up any day and ban your handle. When that happens, your entire collected works, which could represent a lifetime of thoughts are gone.

We put so much effort into writing - we should not just make sure this writing is preserved - we should also ensure that we own it. Our writing should be under our control - we should be the one to decide if we delete it, update it or do anything else with it.

Sure, you could always create a blog. The problem with blogs is that there is no engagement. Nobody reacts, nobody gives feedback and it seems like nobody is reading it. Social media gives all that.

But what if we could merge them?

The blog timeline

I suggest that each persons blog should have a timeline, like the facebook newsfeed. On that timeline, the owner of the blog can see all the blogs and accounts that they follow. Basically, if I visit a website like paulgraham.com, I can see a follow button there. When I click it, I start following him, but it shows up on my own website, in the markessien.com/timeline page.

It would be a bit like an RSS subscription on one’s own website, mixed with a linkring.

Expanding to short content

This can be expanded so that there is a ’thoughts’ section in each blog that captures 280 character thoughts and records them on your own blog. These thoughts are mirrored to twitter, and also show up on the blog timeline of everyone who follows you.

With this, you own your own content, but you have engagement from all the people who follow you.