Since I’m at the desk, and trying to figure out the transition between pages 11 and 12 in the script in front of me, I’m catching up on some reading.

WordPress bought a regional zoo called Tumblr and put a lot of money into an attempt to turn it into an international attraction. That didn’t go so well, so they’ve stopped all renovations and are focussing on just trying to keep the animals alive. Xitter is, according to Muskie, doing the “pivot to video.” Memory is so short now that nobody seems to recall the Facebook pivot to video, which seemed to be designed expressly to get news organisations to put a lot of money into video production. A year or two later, Facebook pivoted out of video and took away any algo advantage video had, and crashed a whole bunch of news businesses as a result. Given how much Muskie enjoys news investigations about himself and his actions, I can’t help but wonder if he thinks that can be done again. Instagram figured out the loophole that allowed people like me to view images through RSS and closed it. I have no idea what happens on Facebook or Threads or Bluesky or Mastodon or any of the other things. I use a newsletter called The Future Party to learn about TikTok and YouTube.

The recent talk in areas of the Isles of Blogging about some kind of return/evolution of the inter-blog communications of the 00s seems in part to be about social media’s loss of relevance. And, I guess, its failures to actually connect any more.

Jason Kottke’s melancholy “What good is a blog without a thriving community of other blogs?”  from the other year probably applies here too.

There’s a notion abroad that perhaps it is time for the independent hand-rolled personal web again. I have this feeling that it may be a sign of a maturing media landscape – when you’ve only got four channels and a handful of magazines, none of which speak to you, then it’s time for zine fairs, mail art, public access cable shows and the like, right? Everything old is new again. streaming FAST channels are essentially just basic cable and commercial television. All this we did, to reinvent that. Maybe that’s where things are now.

I read the news sites and newsletters I subscribe to, my RSS reader and the ooh.directory updates ticker.