So let’s talk about Dave Winer for a moment. I last mentioned him when he was getting all worked up over Spirit of America for no reason at all. Well, in true Dave Winer style, he’s yanked the blogs out from underneath 3,000 bloggers with absolutely no notice. To his credit, he’s made as much of an apology as I think his ego will allow him (that is to say almost none).
There are a lot of ways he could’ve avoided this sort of situation ranging from good technical solutions that would allow him to continue hosting the blogs to decent communication that could’ve kept people from being shocked to see their blogs disappear. He wasn’t interested in doing any of that… instead, he ran roughshod over the whole thing, fucking it up royally.
In the comments to this post he seems to think everyone OWES him something. They OWE it to him not to be mad. They OWE it to him not to complain. Honestly, as far as I’m concerned, nobody owes him jack. “ac” (probably short for “Anonymous Coward”) spoke to this issue in the comments:
Dave got as good as he gave. 3000 blogs on his “free” server was a big testbed for the technologies he was trying to develop, evangelize and sell. It was a huge marketing kick for him
EXACTLY. That’s not to say that people should be ingrates or unappreciative… but nobody OWES it to him.
I probably won’t be “fortunate” enough for His Highness to grace my comments, but if he does, he’ll probably spout some tripe about what I’m doing to help… and just in case, let me get that out of the way first: I’m helping to create a social stigma so people are less prone to act like asshats in the future. Let’s hope it works.
(Personally, I agree with Kevin)
