Sunday, May 20, 2007

Winer's Strong Brew: Can You Take It?

For some reason Dave Winer's blog doesn't seem to have the readership you'd expect. Many of those who are unabashedly self-referential - like the many others using "social media" to talk about social media - have done very well for themselves, traffic-wise. I guess this may just prove that powering, fostering, and promoting a whole generation of communication may or may not make you fabulously wealthy and popular.

Turning to that general subject, is the matter of whether you see the communications environment as one big "coral reef," to be treated with (semi-commercial or noncommercial) respect.

Winer writes:

Feedburner is part of the RSS coral reef. And rumors say they're selling their piece of the reef for $100 million to Google.

The danger is that Google is a super-power, and coral reefs depend on harmony and no one entity being too powerful. Such an entity might disrupt the fragile ecology of the whole reef. Of course they'll say they won't, but...

Another amazing fact among scattered observations at Scripting.com:

Larry King doesn't use the Internet.

Unrelated thought (somewhat via BoingBoing): Just how big can this peanut butter thing get?

Labels: coral reefs, dave winer, peanut butter, tubes