It’s been a while since I posted here. I wanted to take a step back because I getting an idea that no one was listening. I made a lot of inquiries about ways we could collaborate, but they never went anywhere. However I have seen signs lately that there may be a little interest. So maybe I should put some of my ideas here as well as on my blog.

What I have been advocating, for many years, but just recently gave a name to, is textcasting.

This came from the experience we all had trying to cross-post to a variety of different places. For me the places I wanted to cross-post were Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Slack, Medium and obviously RSS and HTML. But they never came together, there were always such substantial differences between the different views they took of a post, that if I tried to write for the lowest common denominator, it just wouldn’t work. There was no middle ground. And if tried for a subset, well I couldn’t use links, could never give a piece a title, no styling, and on and on.

Compared to graphic PCs, the web was always limited in the styling it could use, but the social media products took most of the rest of it out. And we accepted it. And even now we’re so confused, we’re missing out on the opportunity to create a small network of writer-friendly services. We could have always done that, but we were always waiting for something better to come along from the big companies. We’re still waiting.