Writing random missives on Twitter generates more views than a blog post gets at the moment. It is not even close in terms of a comparison. I just got done looking at the data and it made me wonder a little bit about the nature of the open internet. A lot of walled off gardens exist where people go to engage and are a user of the platform. Sometimes parts of the internet get extended to those gardens, but it is becoming more and more a garden of paywalled content. More and more publications that write stories either within the world of entertainment, information, or news open the door to a few free stories and then try to get users to cross over into the paywalled version of things. It’s a world of online gardens of paywalled content that is fundamentally different from a bunch of content being interconnected by really simple syndication (RSS) feeds. 

This blog for example has a large bulk of content from before 2014 that is set to private. Even my collection of online missives housed in this blog format has a section that is essentially paywalled. That wall has been built for an audience of one, but that does not make it anymore real as a segmentation against the open internet. That is perhaps the point I’m getting around to as we round out the second paragraph of this thought. Building out a functional search engine for the open internet seems like something that might be a good use of my time. Instead of focusing on all the online gardens of paywalled content that users cannot really access without being a subscriber of those services it might be easier to just help people get to other sources of content. Right now the picture I have in my mind is of delivering two sets of results from curated sets of sources while denoting that one list is essentially paywalled and the other is fundamentally not. 

You might be asking yourself if that is essentially my effort at building a really large RSS feed reader that is curated. I think that might very well be what I’m talking about. Building out my own personal really large RSS feed portal is probably a project that I could knock out this summer. Adding the searchable component to it would be a pretty lightweight extension. Overall the value inherent to the project would be my personal curation of the content. That would not be easily replicated as it is essentially a personally tailored news feed with some search extensibility. I may go look to see if I have a parked domain that could be used to house this project.