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Monday, March 20, 2006
Raising the Mercury 
| | Many years ago, not long after I moved to Silicon Valley in 1985, I was amazed at how little, considering its home court advantage, the Mercury-News covered what what was happening there. And this was in the days when every techie's mailbox was crammed every day with tech weeklies and monthlies fattened with advertising by companies that could also be advertising in the Mercury-News. |
| | So I wrote to one of the editors at the paper (I forget who), suggesting that they take advantage of economics as well as proximity. The response I got back was discouraging. The paper was written, overall, to a reader with an 8th-grade education, the editor said. The focus of the paper was too general. In other words, just forget it. |
| | Now Dan Gillmor is suggesting, essentially, that the paper be taken over by an organization that takes tech seriously. Or that at least gets what techology, the Net and citizen journalism are doing to the newspaper business — and can move forward cluefully. Not sure what will work here. But Dave and Jay also have analyses worth reading. All three respond to the Save the Merc campaign. |
Following Dave
| | I've said more than once that when they scroll the credits of my life, Dave Winer will be one of the top names in the list. |
| | Same goes for blogging, if not for the blogosphere. |
| | Because blogging will last forever, while the blogosphere we've known since Dave led us into the Tech Blogging era (1999-2005) is flattening and reorganizing into countless uniting and dividing topics of interest. |
| | When I wished Dave a happy birthday last April 30, both of us were in the Top 10 of Technorati's Top 100. Now he's at #95 and I'm gone. (From the 2-in-1 irony department, #45 is Dr. Dave, which is, coincidentally, the radio identity I used more than thirty years ago, and from which my nickname was derived.) |
| | There are still plenty of tech-oriented blogs in the top 100, starting with BoingBoing and Engadget, which are still, deservedly, #1 and #2. But celebrities, politics, sex and other topics that float atop the polular mainstream media charts will inevitably lift blogs that obsess on those subjects to the top of Technorati as well. |
| | Which is why (and I have no knowledge here, for what it's worth) Technorati will, inevitably, have to produce many topical charts. |
| | (And it still won't matter, except to those who obsess about celebrity. Including areas where celebrity matters least, such as in tech.) |
| | But when we look back, we'll remember that the pioneers of blogging were techies and journalists and publishers, and that Dave pushed all of us forward when and where it mattered most. |
| | So, while some of us want to smack the door on Dave's ass as he moves on, here are a few things I'd like all of us to remember about Dave now. Because they'll all get clearer once he's gone: |
| | - He's honest to a fault.
- He's a prophet. A friend of mine who works at Microsoft once told me an associate the company once said something like "Ignore Dave at your peril. He sees the future, and there's always a good chance he's right about stuff nobody else sees." I believe most of us still don't see what Dave saw in outlining, presenting, publishing, syndication, amateurism, scripting, APIs and "developers and users, diggin' together", to name just a few topics where he's done pioneering work. Including blogging, by the way. Go back and read what Dave said about blogging coming from publishing more than from tech.
- He can, and does, change his mind. (Listen to this for background on Dave and XML, for example.)
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| | I could go on, but you get the points. |
| | A larger one: Dave's moving on marks a passage.  Blogging as we knew it is done. The pioneering stage is over. The early adopter-early majority stage is here. Dave's a pioneer. A frontiersman. He's moving on to the next valley. While I'm sad that he's leaving this one, I'm even more curious about the next thing he knows that the rest of us don't. Yet. |
Dept. of Excess
| | Have you noticed that bloggers are now starting to be referred to with middle names? Something that was once reserved some more unsavory characters. For instance, the other day I was reading Robert "The Scobleizer" Scoble. Up in Canada there is Joey "The Accordian Guy" DeVilla. Of course everyone counts David "Joho the Blog" Weinberger as one of the godfathers along with Doc "Doc Searls Weblog" Searls (well some of them work better than others). If we travel to Europe we might meet niek "Shutterclog" hockx in a dark canal. Dean "Deanland" Landsman and Jeff "BuzzMachine" Jarvis rule the East Coast. |
| | But probably most feared would be the women of the blogoshere. Who would not defer to the likes of Shelley "Burningbird" Powers and Jeneane "Allied" Sessum. And don't forget Liz "mamamusing" Lawley who rules over two states. |
| | I still haven't figured Frank "Sandhill Trek" Paynter out but I image this scene a few years in the future. |
| | The problem, of course, is that brandish associations change. For example, Steve XML RSS "Attention" "Gestures" Gillmor. |
| | I rather like when Kim "meta" Cameron, Architect of Identity for Microsoft (and beyond) refers to his many selves as "The committee of the whole". |
| | By the way, Noded is an excellent and funny blog. Check it out. |
| | Also just discovered (with help from his beautiful wife): George Sessum, who I was thrilled to hang out with (though not nearly for long enough) in Austin. |
On the whole, he'd rather blog in Philadelphia
| | Daniel Rubin's Blinq blog (the inq derives from the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he works) is a terrific discovery passed along by John Palfrey, and Required Reading for fans of the City of Bloggeryly Love. |
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