Roundup: Standard.site goes upstream, x402, and the content licensing debate

📝 It's all coming together for standard.site

After just 8 months, starting with collaboration between publishing apps Leaflet, Pckt, and Offprint, Bluesky has officially integrated standard.site publications directly into the timeline:

• https://atproto.com/blog/standard-site-bluesky-timeline
• Offprint reaction: https://news.offprint.app/a/3mmqsgq4art23-your-writing-now-native-to-bluesky
• Leaflet reaction: https://lab.leaflet.pub/3mmwnyfqhyc2d
• Pckt reaction: https://pckt.blog/b/notes/standardsite-link-cards-are-coming-to-bluesky-zcv9dj6

Jim Ray, DevRel at Bluesky, interviews Brooke from pckt.blog, Jared from Leaflet, and Miguel from Offprint to discuss the creation of a new shared format https://atproto.com/off-protocol/do-this-together-standard-site

There are already other platforms releasing their own standard.site integrations:

• WordPress released ATmosphere 1.0.0, a plugin that integrates the ATmosphere into WordPress sites, including populating Bluesky replies, likes, and reposts as comments to your WP post, as well as standard.site support https://activitypub.blog/2026/05/20/atmosphere-1-0-0-liftoff/
• Micro.blog, the "indieweb as a service" platform also shipped Standard.site support https://news.micro.blog/2026/05/30/added-support-for-standardsite-to.html

❇️ AI corner

Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb has a new site, the Agentic Web News. Read his analysis on Google I/O https://agenticweb.news/google-agentic-web/

Scott Klein did an analysis of "AI-Coding Signals" in around 360 newsroom repositories on GitHub. It's a bit speculative, but tracks with trends, and there are some insights about newsroom's use of AI and open source code https://openjournalism.news/2026/05/18/vibe-coding-is-growing-fast-in-newsrooms-too/

The Economist launched a ChatGPT app, "testing the waters" and trying to find out what audience on ChatGPT looks like. https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/the-economist-launches-a-dedicated-chatgpt-app/

The next IETF AIPREF meeting is now scheduled for London August 24-26 https://ietf-wg-aipref.github.io/wg-materials/interim-26-08/agenda.html

Audrey Hingle at Internet Exchange Point shares some research on AI crawlers and opt-out tools… which face challenges both of utilization and of effectiveness https://internet.exchangepoint.tech/creators-need-ai-opt-out-tools-they-can-actually-use/

"We have a billion 402 responses every single day on the Cloudflare network" [emphasis added — Editors]. HTTP 402 is browser error for "Payment Required". A billion a day is a lot of hits that Cloudflare is trying to convert with its x402 standard for internet payments. The experiment is still small, but AWS has integrated it. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/05/05/ai-agents-are-breaking-web-economics-but-cloudflare-says-x402-can-help

The Open Markets Institute is not a fan of the AI content licensing market. Unlike previous iterations like search and social media, "the extraction is more visible, the legal claims are more mature, and the journalism sector has had time to observe how prior platform relationships developed." The OMI concludes that a fair result rides on "whether the journalism industry collectively can make a unified case that its contribution to the Al economy deserves recognition not as a favor or as a product of platform goodwill, but as a matter of economic viability, legal obligation, and democratic necessity." https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications/report-mapping-the-ai-content-licensing-market

🗞️ News news

Sam Guzik from WNYC offers a compass for news publishers to choose their strategy going forward https://wan-ifra.org/2026/05/civic-duty-or-community-hub-sam-guziks-two-question-compass-for-the-ai-era/

Omedia State of Audience in Media 2026 reports that" 26% say AI-driven disruption is the biggest external threat to audience strategy", and "68% say newsletters or digest products are their most effective retention tactic" with 67% saying email and newsletters were their top audience growth driver https://www.omeda.com/resources/reports/state-of-audience-2026/

Looking for in-depth research on local news? Check out this new database of studies https://www.localnewsresearchhub.com

Micro-payments in Kenya are instructive not only because the M-Pesa system is way smoother and cheaper than credit card transactions, but the experiments in where to put your micro-payments (ie. what layer other than a single article or the entire paper) so that users will actually pay for perceived value, and also will drive them to becoming a subscriber. If you could express access tiers in content metadata (paper section, content type, author, topic,e tc) then the payment layer can be matched to the content signal rather than requiring the publisher to manually gate every URL — a thought for protocol developers. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/micropayments-news-have-failed-everywhere-can-they-succeed-kenya

🤝 Meeting in Person

PublicSpaces Conference is this week June 4-6 in Amsterdam where New_ Public, PublicSpaces and Waag Futurelab will be presenting the inaugural Open Social Awards. https://conference.publicspaces.net/en

Next week is the Digital Publishing Summit, happening June 8-9th in in Prague, Czechia featuring discussion on interoperable standards relevant to AI licensing, DRM, discovery, and commerce. https://www.edrlab.org/events/digital-publishing-summit-2026-program

SRCCON 2026 July 8-9 2026 (Minneapolis) https://srccon.org

After the Podcast Show in London, members of the Podcast Standards Project got together to discuss how to use open standards to move the ecosystem forward. Nice to see collaboration like this! https://podstandards.org/2026/05/22/podcast-rss-nerds-unite-in-london/