Maybe I have totally misunderstood WebMentions. But in the IndieWeb plugin that I tried, it appeared to me so confusing that I never really got it working for me — never had the patience.
After reading Downes’s critique, I understand now that a big part of the problem is their concept of a post.
They have plenty of distinct ‘moulds’ for posts (e.g. checkin, event, presentation, bookmark, jam, read, watch, review, listen, collection, venue). This offering style is unlike gRSShopper’s generic malleability, and unlike the generic “items” in my own Condensr.de, and it is also what I disliked in a previous post.
What I would want, instead, is a distinction between a post and a comment. I’m now a user of the “silo” of WordPress.com, and in this ecosystem, the (proprietary) Pingback works great. I don’t know how I can find the address for the more general trackback on other people’s Blogspots, or even whether my WordPress would still support it, despite it seems to be so unpopular.
For me, the great thing of blogging is that it preserves a sense of place, i.e. the idea that I am visiting someone on their (decentralized) front porch, rather than on the central market place, and that I can feel as a guest when I leave a (moderated) comment.
I chose wordpress because it was the easily available service for anyone who wanted to participate in the “conversation”. Before, in 2004, I hand-crafted the XML for my RSS by myself. But despite it was valid RSS, it was not until I switched to WordPress that I was discovered and started to receive comments.
I still believe in the idea of the “conversation”, despite many Social Media users now think that consuming content is the important thing here — and hence go to the large sites of the power law distribution where this consuming is easiest.
The easiest entry (or re-entry) into the conversation, however, would be to create a site on whatever platform, not immmediately a self-hosted thing or a server
x28's new Blog 