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Comment by Peteragain | Hacker News Reader

I am always delighted when I come across a good one, but finding good ones is the problem. Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO) many years ago said there were 3 ways to find things: browsing - from were you are, look about. If you're in the high street and hungry, walk and look. It is no use knowing what is 5km away or what was available there 6 months ago. Categories are another - think Dewey Decimal system. These are expensive to produce and get out dated, but you know when something is _not_ available. Third is tags attached to items and a search engine. Content words at good tags but the challenge is to stop vested interests gaming the system - telling you you can get it through Amazon tomorrow when you could get it from across the road today, or when The State doesn't want you to know what "the Russian Narrative" is (other than "it's bad"). A search engine specifically for blogs would be great if we knew how to make it work in the long term.

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I took a MOOC course for teachers which advocated long form blogging for course assignments + social media short posts with appropriate tags to publicize/connect with classmates.

At the time they suggested using Twitter or Facebook. And while I had a twitter account, I rarely used it. Over the period of the course, I managed to cultivate a nice community out of a largely unused account, and connected with like minded individuals on programming and, due to the course’s target audience, teachers.

The course then taught you to analyze the social media posts using the Twitter API. Turtles all the way down. It was the best MOOC I ever participated in.

So this experience has become my prototype for blogging and publicity—blog+social media.

I’ve not continued the blogging (the class was in 2010?), but I have tried to cultivate, for example, on BlueSky a community of _only_ my personal and professional interests (not unlike HN content), but politics, entertainment and sports keep muddying the waters.

It’s impossible to control your feeds these days, so I don’t know if Blog+Social is a pattern that works _today_ with the current crop of social. Not sure if people who are NOT _in it for the money_ can achieve the personal engagement necessary to carry on.

Small aside, during COVID NYC Python community met on online. It continued for over a year and then fizzled out. But oh what a glorious year of weekly online meetups. And every one had the good taste to keep it to Python and their ruddy projects. Hehe.

Thanks for sharing. I think that, today, Ross is wrong and there is another way.. much like (I think) you are describing.

blog softwares should facilitate the production of a feed river: what a specific author likes is sometimes as valuable, or more, as what they write

Yes. The challenge is to understand how the river comes about, and at the same time, preventing it being gamed by vested interests.

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