What if the blogs we read didn’t just scroll past us in our RSS inboxes? What if we could consult the wisdom of our networks of bloggers on demand, in realtime, relative to topics of current interest?
I have been thinking about this a different way. I find that many people on email lists just don’t get information they’re looking for, either due to misconfigured spam filters or whitelisting or some combination.
What if we just dropped email altogether and “delivered” with RSS? You send me a message by creating a post signed with a public key (for which I have the private counterpart) and my client polls your feed so it can fetch and decrypt the messages as needed.
If you don’t know me (ie, you’re not on a whitelist or receiver filter), your client has to exchange keys with mine: if you don’t supply a key, you don’t get mine, and we don’t communicate.
Complex? Kludgy? Is the necessity of a key exchange going to make it harder to spam? I’m not sure. Perhaps if the keys are issued by an authority who verifies people’s information, not just a home-rolled gpg key . . .
What I want — again — is the transparency of email, where anyone can send anyone a message, but without having to deal with an onslaught of tedious advertising and crap.