June 16, 2004

Winer Speaks Again

Here's what ticks me off about Dave Winer's weblogs.com shutdown: He refuses to admit he made a mistake. He thinks that putting a notice of a future shutdown on his weblog wouldn't have been effective. Maybe, maybe not. He does write one of the most linked ones in the blogosphere. He could have at least tried it. Not all would have been notified, but at least he's have a legitimate excuse.

I can empathize with all the stress Winer is under. I don't blame him for shutting down his generous, free service. I blame him for treating many webloggers with such little respect. We're all suppose to stand by and nod our heads in agreement as Winer writes about all his problems. What about some empathy for those webloggers who poured so much into their weblogs only to seem them ubruptly vanish?

Then Winer gets all sanctimonious. He writes,

One of these days in this weblog world kindness may be part of how we deal with each other.

From my brief encounters with Winer I've learned he's one of the most thin-skinned and stubborn webloggers around. Everyone else can be wrong, but not him. He can be quite controlling at meetings especially when things aren't going as smoothly as he'd like. But even with these personality quirks he's done so much to grow the weblogging community through evangelism and his work on RSS and other tools. His successful efforts to grow this new means of expression should help him see why many are upset with him. His shutdown of Weblogs.com was a betrayal to his users and to the blogosphere as a whole. Sadly, Winer doesn't even realize he's done anything wrong.

He once told me that he'd be satisfied if through his technology work two people--just two--could find a way to truly communicate with each other. If that happened he'd consider his efforts a success. Through all Winer's hard work he got many, many more to touch one another through word, picture, and sound. Suddenly snipping those strings of communication is another reason so many are upset. Maybe Winer didn't think people were "truly communicating" yet. If so, no one but him knows that that term means.

It's interesting that man who writes that he's spent so much time on the "connection between the First Amendment and technology" then goes on to blast non-Weblogs.com webloggers for sticking their noses where they don't belong. It's people like me who are "behaving badly are people on the sidelines" (I thought the whole blogosphere was a community. His two BloggerCons certainly weren't limited to Manila and Radio users.) and are "hogging the microphone right now" (How, since the beauty of a weblog is giving anyone a soapbox?). (He probably doesn't think this remix is very funny. I think it's hilarious.)

I wish Winer only the best. I hope his health problems are relieved. I hope his burdens are lessened. And I hope he's learned good citizenship means living by the rules you aspire other to abide by.

For more reading there's James Grimmelmann's post. What he makes you realize is with this fiasco Winer has hurt his work on RSS. If Winer wants to continue the good progress he's made he's going to have to own up to his mistakes. His credibility is at stake. Dori Smith notes that Winer's old company UserLand should bear some of the blame. Point taken.

"Morning Coffee Notes"