Dave Winer writes about Circa and their fundamental mistake of not embracing the open web with easy linking:
“Linkblogging is a real thing, and there are people who are good at it. But if there's no URL for each story, you can't linkblog it. So they didn't grow fast enough. I think this is almost mathematical. No one, going forward, should try this. Each story must have a way to get to it through a Web address.”
We can be cynical about what the “open web” means, thinking it’s just marketing or spin. But it’s real and Dave shows how obvious it is to understand. It doesn’t matter if a web site or iPhone app is based around web technologies like HTTP and HTML. If it can’t be linked to or there’s no web API, it isn’t part of the open web.
Linkblogging is a special form of microblogging, and a significant part of Twitter is actually linkblogging. Tools that understand linkblogging will typically reduce the friction of writing by prompting for a quick note to go with a URL that’s already on the clipboard, for example. I don’t usually blog in this style, but I made sure these linkblog posts look great in the platform I’m working on.
