RSS and JSON Feed Live on theailab.org · Why We Publish on the Open Web's Original Open Distribution Standard

Today we shipped two feeds for theailab.org/insights. The first is RSS 2.0 at theailab.org/feed.xml. The second is JSON Feed 1.1 at theailab.org/feed.json. Every editorial post on this site now flows into both feeds automatically. If you read through Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, NewsBlur, Reeder, FreshRSS, Miniflux, or any of the other readers that have quietly carried serious internet writing for two decades, you can subscribe today.

This is the announcement. The rest of this short essay is the why.

An Open Protocol Should Publish on an Open Protocol

We have spent the last two years building the Trust Identity Protocol. The thesis of the protocol is that open standards beat platform capture. A cryptographic signature bound to a verified human is meaningful only if the standard governing it belongs to no one. The protocol is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The reference implementations are licensed under TIPCL-1.0, which automatically converts to Apache 2.0 on January 1, 2031. The governance body is a multi-stakeholder AI Trust Council with a majority of independent voting members. The protocol does not work, in the long run, unless it belongs to the public.

If we believe that, we should publish that way. RSS is the original open distribution standard for the web. Specified by Dave Winer and others in 1999, ratified informally by a generation of writers, archived by Yahoo and rescued by community editors, hardened by Aaron Swartz, and quietly carried by every reader from Bloglines to Google Reader to Feedly. No single company owns it. No platform can take it away. It is the closest thing the internet has to a public road for editorial content.

If you believe in an open protocol, you publish on an open protocol.

What You Get When You Subscribe

The RSS feed includes every published essay on this site, sorted newest first. Each item carries the editorial headline, the publication date, the author byline, the dek, a short summary, the canonical URL, the hero image, and all category tags. We also publish a JSON Feed 1.1 version at /feed.json for readers and ingest pipelines that prefer JSON, including the modern AI training crawlers that index structured content at higher refresh rates than HTML pages.

Both feeds are advertised through standard <link rel="alternate"> tags on every page of theailab.org. If your reader has auto-discovery, you can paste theailab.org into its add-feed dialog and it will find both feeds for you.

What Changes After the Genesis Date

The current implementation is unsigned. That is deliberate. We are in the Pre-Genesis Period, the period from June 1, 2026 through the Genesis Date when the federated network goes live. During this period, the canonical Specification is published, the AI Trust Council Charter is ratified, and the Founding Node Operators stand up their nodes in pre-Genesis operating mode. The federated DAG does not yet accept production records.

On the Genesis Date, that changes. From the Genesis Date forward, every item in theailab.org/feed.xml will carry a TIP-CONTENT record signed by an editorial CTID held by The AI Lab. The signature will appear as a custom namespace inside each RSS item, declaring the Origin Code (OH for original human, AA for AI-assisted, AG for AI-generated), the canonical content fingerprint produced by the Canonical Normalization Algorithm Version 2.2, and the federated DAG entry where the signed record is recorded. A reader using a TIP-aware client will verify the signature inline. A reader using a conventional RSS client will see the same content as today, unaffected.

We will be, to our knowledge, the first publisher in the world to publish a Trust Identity Protocol-signed RSS feed. We invite other publishers to do the same. The reference implementation and documentation will be published at theailab.org/feed-tip alongside the launch.

RSS is the original verifiable web. The Trust Identity Protocol is the verifiable web that follows.

A Note on Platforms

The reasonable counter-question, if you are a reader of internet writing in 2026, is why bother. Most insights and announcements travel through LinkedIn, X, Substack, and the email lists those platforms wrap around. The answer is that those distribution channels are not yours. The list is rented from the platform. The reach can be reduced by an algorithm change. The audience can be paywalled retroactively by the new owner. An RSS subscription is an unmediated relationship between writer and reader. The reader chooses to subscribe, the writer chooses to publish, and no third party stands in the middle.

We will continue to be on LinkedIn and on X. We will continue to publish through email when readers ask us to. But the canonical channel for The AI Lab's editorial work is theailab.org and the canonical mode of distribution is RSS. That is the channel we will sign first, that is the channel we will support longest, and that is the channel we believe should outlast any specific platform decision either we or anyone else might make.

After the Genesis Date, every item in our feed will be signed.

How to Subscribe

1. Feedly · paste theailab.org/feed.xml into the add-content dialog, or search "theailab.org" once Feedly's index picks up the feed.
2. Inoreader · same. Inoreader auto-detects both RSS and JSON Feed and offers you the choice.
3. NetNewsWire · paste either URL. Auto-discovery works on theailab.org directly.
4. NewsBlur, Reeder, FreshRSS, Miniflux, Feedbin · same pattern.
5. Email · pipe the RSS feed into Buttondown, Kill The Newsletter, or Mailbrew to receive the items in your inbox.
6. Slack, Discord, IRC · most chat platforms have RSS bots that post new items into a channel as they appear.

That is the whole announcement. The feeds are live. They are clean against the W3C Feed Validator. They will be cryptographically signed on the Genesis Date. We will see you in your reader.