Dave Winer

It’s a simple counterargument framed in symbols and numbers: $3 million. That’s how much Winer claims to have made from his blog over the years, sans advertising.

While running a company, Winer used his blog to talk about what the company was doing. Net profit: $500k. Consulting gigs stemming from the blog: “a few hundred thousand.” Sale of weblogs.com to Verisign after only mentioning it on his blog: $2.3 million.

“So we’re already over $3 million — and all I did was what any blogger does — talk about what I’m doing. And that’s the role of a blog, it’s a way of communicating what you’re doing. Companies, consultants and authors need to do a lot of communicating, and blogs allow you to go direct, and be more efficient, less diluted. People get a real feel for who you are and how you think and what you’re like as a person.”

Then again, Winer did sort of invent RSS, among other things. That might have helped.

Regardless of whether one has enough geek cred to profit from his or her blog (or owns a fortunate domain name), Winer makes a great point about how a blog can make a person money without AdSense. Your blog is how you communicate about your business, product, service, or art, to the world. The only requirements are that you be interesting, passionate, and committed.
 

Those heralded A-listers we all looked to over the past few years? Many of them are hanging it up. Mike Arrington: handed over the TechCrunch reins to hired staff. Jason Calacanis: moved to email. Their chief complaints: fame. Too many haters, too much spit in the face.

Dan Lyons

This week’s quitter is Dan Lyons, the Newsweek writer who rocketed to blogsopheric recognition because of his satirical blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, now soured on "another high-tech fairy tale." His reason: there’s no money in blogging. The day the New York Times blew his Fake Steve Jobs cover, Lyons says, “more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job.”

Every tech blogger’s Silicon Valley heyday nemesis—which has reduced staff to exactly one blogger—Valleywag was quick to note Lyons scored a book deal out of his little experiment with popular anonymity. And it was well deserved. The Fake Steve Jobs idea was a well-played stroke of genius.

This crop of A-listers aren’t the first to have blog-related meltdowns. They may be, though, the first to really go and stay gone. Self-proclaimed original blogger Dave Winer is known for periodic threats to stop blogging. Yet, he still blogs. Robert Scoble, chief among the famous-for-blogging-and-I-wrote-the-book-on-blogging elite, is prone to emotional denouncements of the craft and self-imposed mental health hiatuses. Yet, he still blogs, though to a lesser degree.

Some people just can’t help it. They have to blog. Like it’s a sickness. Some are victims of their own success. Fame isn’t, by nature, for everyone, even if fifteen minutes has been edited down to five public-commentary-abusive ones. And still yet others are disillusioned victims of hype and zeitgeists.

This list of types could go on and on. There are as many reasons to blog, or not to blog, as there are people. One thing is for certain: we seem to be at a blogging crossroads. Sadly (but perhaps naturally), pivotal, transformational (and sometimes bloody) moments are often misconstrued as deadly ones. Blogging has reached a crucial moment in its evolution, one where competition for money, credibility, and attention has never been fiercer. The weak, those whose prime devotion is getting rich, getting famous, getting laid, or getting approval will be culled. In the end, as in the beginning, it’s about purity and (some type of) artistic integrity. 

When I was in the fifth grade I joined the basketball team along with 40 of my friends. I was a chubby ten year old counted among the first who would give up when faced with laps and suicide sprints and leg lifts, pushups, and sit-ups as the coaches sought to weed out the weak and uncommitted (and produce a more manageable basketball team). And, after a week, I nearly ran home to enjoy Grandma’s gravy and biscuits in my-body-doesn’t-hurt peace. My mother, though, reminded me of my commitment, and by the middle of the season—when the coach had become fed up with his starting fast little waifs—I earned my starting forward position and never felt better about myself.    

Blogging, I think, is at a similar moment in its development, a moment all writers (and other content producers) must struggle through until they form a key component of their wills that says never give up.

I find it interesting that as soon as negativity about the economy set in, especially among those tech bloggers who thrive on bubbles and print journalists suddenly out of a decent-paying job who are forced to turn to blogging or dry cleaning, the negativity surrounding blogging also set in. Not enough money. Too many haters. A waste of time and energy. All hype no delivery. A cause of undue stress, obesity, and myocardial infarction. These were the same people, back when that bubble was still good and cozy, once so jazzed about The Secret, this century’s remake of Norman Vincent Peele’s The Power of Positive Thinking.

True, the average blogger pulls in a mere $5,000-$6,000 per year, and that average is obscenely skewed by the top one percent of bloggers pulling more than $200,000. True, there are more abandoned blogs than active ones. True, content in a world that values cheap, short, and easy has been reduced to embarrassing values (I saw one ad on craigslist offering $1.50 per “article”). True, there is worldwide competition for diffused and dwindling ad dollars. True, there has been a deluge of marketers, spammers, and professional bloggers (a.k.a. writers) and “mainstream” media types pushing out the wild and wooly (and unreliable and piggybacking and libelous) amateur, citizen journalists. True, viewers, readers, and fans can be nasty.

Welcome to the media business.

The good stuff lasts, the chaff separates from the wheat, the cream rises to the top, all that. The earliest bloggers and the self-sustained content producers may not like the idea that the blogosphere is changing and will require an old law of media: Content is king, but the king answers to his god, the network.

Save for a few shining stars (think, using radio as an example, Howard Stern an Rush Limbaugh and their hundreds of millions) and stellar independent publications, the network is what will save the blogosphere and content producers. It’s always been tough for individuals to make it in media without a network behind them, paying them good (even great) wages to produce, while the network aggregates and sells content and collective audiences to advertisers.

Like it or not, the corporation is going to have to enter the blogosphere, and by irony, will ruin it in order to save it. Luckily, unlike the past, there will be wider avenues via user-generated media for quality content producers, so long as they have the passion and will to walk those avenues. Besides, writers write, bloggers blog, regardless.
 

“So what?” you’re probably asking.

Well, there’s a few things that Disqus does.

1. It hooks into FriendFeed. Why does that matter? Well, if you register your Disqus account (like I have) all of your comments left on blogs that use Disqus’s service, will show up on FriendFeed. Look at my FriendFeed stream. You’ll already see my Seesmic video comments that I left on some other blogs.
2. In the past hour they just turned on video comments thanks to a partnership with Seesmic. Go here to see my first video comment left on Dave Winer’s blog.
3. There’s an identity system. I don’t have to sign into comment on anyone’s blog who also has Disqus implemented. For instance, when I went over to costpernews.com and left another video comment there, I didn’t need to sign in. Plus my comments have my picture on them, which makes it less likely that someone will steal my identity.
4. Disqus comments are spam resistant. Because they use a robust identity system across blogs they can kick people off who misbehave.
5. Disqus comments are threaded.

Sam Harrelson was the first one to report the Seesmic/Disqus news on his CostPerNews blog.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing this is because the video commenting system is quite nice. Easy to use and easy to watch.

This is yet another piece in connecting us all together in the real time system I call “the World Wide Talk Show.”

Here’s some sites that have the Disqus/Seesmic commenting feature turned on:

http://loiclemeur.com/
http://louisgray.com/
http://shegeeks.net/
http://winextra.com/
http://avc.blogs.com/
http://howardlindzon.com/
http://scripting.com

More will almost certainly come soon. I’m looking at this technology too. I’ve been talking with Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic (the folks who run my blog) and they are looking at a raft of things to do to make commenting better for WordPress.com users.

So, let the commenting wars begin!

If you are a blog owner, what do you think about Disqus? Like it? Recommend it to other people?

Comments

Dave Winer chose blogs; New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz opted for his publication. Rogers Cadenhead kept tabs on the five-year old long bet, and noted the blogs edged out the Times, 3-2.

"Associated Press editors and news directors chose the top 10 news stories of the year, which makes it possible to determine who won the bet," Cadenhead wrote. Since Winer won, the World Wide Web Consortium should see a check from Nisenholtz arrive.

Though Winer won this head to head matchup, neither blogs nor the Times came out ahead of other major media outlets in searches on Google. Also, another non-media site trumped bloggers and Times reporters, said Cadenhead:

Wikipedia, which was only one year old in 2002, ranks higher today on four of the five news stories: 12th for Chinese exports, fifth for oil prices, first for the Iraq war, fourth for the mortgage crisis and first for the Virginia Tech killings.

"Our most trusted source on the biggest news stories of 2007 is a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover," Cadenhead wrote.

Despite that, people are linking to Wikipedia in numbers sufficient to help it climb the search rankings. If people see Wikipedia as being that authoritative, maybe Wikipedia should have earned the proceeds of that bet.

Say Goodbye To Ye Olde Editorial Process

What’s Formatting?

In print journalism, things are done a certain way, have been for decades. Editors and writers haggle over what’s important, choose an order and a placement for the stories. The Associated Press publishes a book’s worth of guidelines, dictating everything frm abbreviations to punctuation to how numbers are to be presented.

Never begin a sentence with a numeral, spell it out; spell out numbers less than 10.

The structure of an article is also crucial, born from the logistics of wire services and the method by which people read the newspaper.

The most important information goes first; details are filled in later.

This is called the inverted news pyramid. It works on paper because people tend to skim the headlines and the leads (ledes). The rules of writing for print are so numerous that no self-respecting editor, unless he’s memorized the whole of the tradition, is caught without a copy of the AP Stylebook on his desk.

I have a copy – in storage. I work on the Internet, where the rules are changing, and they’re changing because the needs and habits of the audience are changing.

 
Nobody Ever Asks About The Language — Stephen King

Some rules will be the same, though usability expert Jakob Nielsen acknowledges what all writers have to learn: passive voice sucks. It’s too slow and confusing. Writers should use active voice as often as possible so the reader can run through without tripping.

Following in the crotchety footsteps of William Strunk, Nielsen says:

[I]t’s usually better to write a positive statement ("do X") than a negative statement ("avoid Y"), and it’s almost always horrible to use double negatives ("avoid not doing X").

Nielsen also says beginning a sentence with a numeral is not only acceptable, but preferable to online readers scanning the page. But then he refers to something much more interesting: the information scent.

Information scent refers to the extent to which users can predict what they will find if they pursue a certain path through a website.

The scent is caught within the first 2 to 3 words (the first two to three words), as readers scan information in an F-shaped pattern. It is because of the information scent that Nielsen reverses himself:

Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

Traditional editors reading this may ask, "For what kind of effectiveness?" This may be a matter judgment, though, and not necessarily a hard and fast rule, but passive voice can help readers find the information scent in the search results, where titles and blurbs or ledes appear.

It depends on the situation, of course. Maybe your initial headline reads "Reindeer mauls Santa Claus," but if you want the information scent to begin with Santa – if optimizing for "Santa" in the SERPs – you might want to rearrange to "Santa Claus mauled by reindeer."

The most important words – "Santa," "Claus," and "mauled" come to the foreground.        

 
Move Over Editors, The Readers Want Your Jobs

It’s not only the language that’s changing, but also the editorial process. Dave Winer, the one who brought us RSS and, arguably, blogging, has been tinkering with the New York Times RSS feed to develop what he calls the New York Times "river."

Winer hasn’t settled yet on the best way to deliver, either by keyword, outline, or chronology, but what he’s developing is definitely a way around the traditional editor’s choice of what’s important. The "river" displays article headlines and blurbs from the Times in text only, organized by the reader’s preference.

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg notes how Winer’s river takes the editorial process and ordering right out of the equation:

The reader who looks at Times River and says “this is how I want my news” is a reader who is saying to the Times editors, “Don’t waste all that time figuring out what to tell me you think is important.”

As Winer put it, “They [editors] have a very powerful internal gravity driven by a philosophy that their job is to arrange our thinking.”

At the University of Kentucky’s College of Communications and Information Studies, we often said, "The media doesn’t tell you what to think, just what to think about." This seems to be what Winer is bent on fixing.

There’s a lot more to this, but this is a Web article and most stopped reading 500 words ago. Too bad for them. They’ll miss a link to my Essentials of Font Philosophy article, a bit of a dirge for the serif fonts. (Hint: Only use sans-serif online; it reads faster.)

Is 30 Too Old To Be A Web Visionary?

I’m 30 now, so I remember my Twenties well, dead as they are. We say "turning" 30 because that’s what is: turning some crazy corner in life. I’m slower, fatter, and my knees and stomach don’t work like they used to. The music’s getting too loud. I like four-door cars and watching the news.

But I’m not dumber, or less in-tune with things, or limited in creativity. In fact, I’d say I’m better than I used to be at everything except jumping. That’s not arrogance. That’s confidence. I’m smarter, more experienced, less apt to be impulsive and have learned more about how the world works.

I’m responsible, mostly because now other people rely on me, rather than just me relying on myself.

The preceding speech is inspired by a recent blogospheric spat that came to a head over the weekend, pitting old against young – a classic battle, really, an "age-old," if you’ll forgive the pun, tale spanning back even to the Old Testament, where conscientious older observers look back and laugh at the ignorance and capriciousness of their youth, and laugh harder as they watch the once-immortal turn 30.

With Thirty comes the epiphany: I really don’t know everything. I’m just really good at blowin’ smoke.

The debate begins with venture capitalist blogger Fred Wilson, who suggested in a multi-part series that web services entrepreneurs over 30 are becoming obsolete. He writes:

I really don’t want to be the guy who made it harder for anyone older than 30 to get funded in the web services market.

But I’ve been thinking about all the young entrepreneurs we are seeing walk through our offices. I’ve been thinking about Mark Zuckerberg, Rob Kalin, all the ycombinator entrepreneurs, and the 15 year olds who are hacking up facebook apps. You can’t ignore it. There is something fundamental and important going on….

Who is developing this "clearer idea"? Who is developing the set of "design patterns"? It’s the younger generation. And its important to understand why.

It is incredibly hard to think of new paradigms when you’ve grown up reading the newspaper every morning. When you turn to TV for your entertainment. When you read magazines on the train home from work.

Though he made a few concessions later, them’s, apparently, fightin’ words. Dave Winer, Original Blogger that he is, was quick to put school in session.

"I’ve been a net native since before I was 20," he writes. "Yes, I read newspapers growing up, but I also blogged before it was called blogging, and created a lot of the technology that the kids are developing now. Yet I’ve had arrogant idiotic asshole kids tell me I don’t understand the net."

Heh. He used the "A" word.

Steve Hodson, aka codenut, takes the curmudgeon profanity to a new level, on par with Mr. Greenlawn’s raspy command to STAY OUTTA MY YARD: 

To Fred – kiss my ass. Just because I have gray hair, fathered a couple of kids, been divorced more than once – you know … that thing call Real Life … doesn’t make me or any of my generation any less of a potential to shift more than an occasional paradigm.

Who the hell do you think invented the net you duffus – it was us gray haired old farts when you were probably still in pampers…[obligatory reference to Berners Lee and Cerf]

You talk about the 20 something’s being the true harbingers of paradigm shifts. Crap. They wouldn’t know a paradigm shift if it slapped them in the face.

If you’re not on the floor laughing now, then you’ve got no sense of humor whatsoever. Just awesome, Steve.

Wilson wasn’t out there on his own though. There are two sides to this, as usual. A surprising supporter is Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team and most certainly not in his Twenties. The same way Hodson cites Winer and Kahn, Dodge reminds us of Jobs, Gates, Brin and Page, all in their Twenties when they changed the world:

Young people have vision for what is possible, and are not blinded by "knowledge" of what is not possible….Older, more experienced people ( I am an old guy) are typically better at taking a startup idea and building it into a business. Older people are great at understanding the potential of "paradigm shifts", but not great at seeing them beforehand.

Indeed, they do seem to need each other most of the time. Brin and Page needed Eric Schmidt. Skywalker needed Obi-Wan Kenobi.

But let’s get back to the arrogant a-holes, that was more fun. Marcus Frind, founder of PlentyOfFish.com (featured on the Today show this morning, it just so happens) takes a harder line on the issue, with a very "modern" view on spelling, capitalization, and punctuation:

I agree with fred,  older people dont’ invent stuff,  they tend to take other peoples ideas and improve on them and use their connections/knowledge/money to get credit for it….

People over 30  tend to go out and look for emerging patterns to predict the future  but don’t really understand it.    Free dating never worked before I came along,

Wow. And girls can’t play baseball, I guess, just like Asians can’t drive and all Kentuckians are toothless, shoeless hillbillies. Nice. Just make sure you keep the pigeon in the hole; he’s unruly when he gets out.

It was as if he announced he was dying. Dave Winer, creator of one of the earliest weblogs, Scripting News, and the guy responsible for stringing together a list of should-be-on-the-side-of-a-robot initials (think RSS, XML-RPC, OPML), announced he’s exiting stage left from the Blogosphere.

“Blogging doesn’t need me anymore,” wrote Winer, adding to his notion that there was nothing left to accomplish. Winer expounded on the ease of creating a website, the transition to open API’s, and the decentralization of news as illustrations of his contributions. It had all been accomplished. He even helped take down a Republican.

But he also had personal reasons. Blogging is demanding for an A-list blogger and Winer’s public life was wearing him thin.

While the bulk of the Blogosphere, some 30 million strong, likely will never have heard of him (and some imply he overstates his own importance), Winer’s decision to stop blogging by the end of the year left those who followed him in a sort of “what do we do now?” state.

“It’s time to rethink everything,” writes Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble who identifies with the plight of the celebrity blogger. “I totally understand why Dave would want to walk away. I’m staring at hundreds of emails and just don’t want to deal with my inbox right nowThe pressure is just incredible to do more, more, more.”

Scoble’s complaint is followed by a (teary-eyed?) exposition of how blogs have lost the human qualities that made them great. “We’ve become marketing machines,” he said.

In a snarky send up, Tom Foremski quotes himself in a seeming Winer epitaph.

“He’ll always be remembered for his original thinking and his oversized ego, and his taking the credit for nearly every new idea on the Internet in the last 10 years. The funny thing is that he actually did invent all the things that he said he invented. We have lost a towering intellect,” Foremski told Foremski.

In addition to his shaping of Web 2.0, Winer will always have one claim over others: Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams mentioned him on record before his decease.

“Dave is one of my favorite sources of information and opinion on the Web. His opinions are passionately held, well-informed, intelligent, argumentative, and quite often wrong,” said Adams. (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

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Anyway, I totally understand why Dave would want to walk away. I’m staring at hundreds of emails and just don’t want to deal with my inbox right now. I’m gonna take the rest of the day off and hang out at SXSW. My sessions are over and now I just have to catch up with the email. I totally understand why Dave wants to take off from his blog. The pressure is just incredible to do more, more, more.

Who made me a gatekeeper? I don’t want that job.

Don’t send me more email pitches please. Don’t beg for me to try out your software. Don’t wait for me to blog about your company or your team or your product or you. That’s what comments here are for. You have direct access to anyone who is reading this post. Pitch in the comments! If your stuff is good, someone will try it out and say so. Maybe even me.

Shel Israel is to be thanked for this post since he wrote about how to pitch him. You know this world is getting nuts when even the ex-PR guys are getting pitched!

Blogging is authentic, and has power because of that, but the marketers have definitely arrived and now my inbox is full of people saying “pick me, pick me.”

Heheheh, the Kansas City Star says I should be my boss’s worst nightmare. The truth is, I’m not deserving of this praise anymore. I can’t even answer all my email anymore. I’m a week behind.

It’s time to rethink everything.

One thing I’ve enjoyed recently is just reading feeds and staying away from the Memetrackers (although, I’ll be honest, I’ve peeked at Memeorandum a few times, it’s a very hard addiction to break). But, I’m enjoying catching up on the lives of real bloggers. You know, the ones on the M list. The B list. The V list. The U list. The Z list. I don’t know what list Fred of A VC is on, but I just saw him talk about too much blogging.

I’ve realized that what got me here was listening. Listening to my friends talk about their lives. Listening to software developers complaining how hard it is to deal with Microsoft (or how hard our software is to use). Listening to people living their lives and noticing THEM.

I’ve gotten away from that cause so many people think that the secret to their commercial success is to get me to link to them or talk about their products.

No, the secret is to start a conversation. Here, let’s go. No, Evan Williams, I can’t figure out our branding either.

Why do I read blogs? To learn about my friends so that I have something to talk with them about. Garrett Fitzgerald, for instance, tells about loving to watch the C5s landing at an airstrip near his house. That brought back memories of seeing the same land at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley (my dad used to work at Lockheed so I had a few opportunities to visit the airbase).

You might say “who cares?” And you’d be missing the point. It’s the small things on blogs that matter to me. It’s the small things that make us human. Increasingly our blogs have lost their humaness. We’ve become marketing machines. Things to be objectified (yes, I did objectify Molly yesterday, we had a great laugh together, if you’ve never been around Molly to hear her laugh you’re missing out). If I hadn’t read Molly’s blog, we never would have connected yesterday. I hugged Zeldman yesterday and said “thank you for the full text feeds.” If I didn’t read blogs, I wouldn’t have known about Zeldman’s feeds. I would have missed an opportunity to say thank you. His kid is adorable, by the way.

Last night I heard Jimmy Wales speak. He told his secret. Why he started Wikipedia. He made me cry. You see, last night we were speaking as part of the 202 event. 20 speakers. Two minutes each on stage. To answer this question: what is the secret?

His secret? He was gonna be cute, he told us. Say something funny about how Wikipedia knew his secret. But, he thought he’d ask his five-year-old daughter. “I don’t have any secrets, dad,” she answered back. But, alas, she turned out to be Jimmy’s secret in the end. See, when she was born she was in a world of hurt. I forget the disease’s name. You know when you have something you can’t remember that you’re in a world of hurt. She was given 1 in 3 odds of living. Jimmy did some research on the Internet and learned everything he could about that strange disease and found one of the world’s leading doctors. He tried an experimental treatment. Only 50% had lived through that so far. The doctor put some new, experimental, protein-based fluid into her lungs and flushed them out. Turned out she lived, and the story ends happily. Jimmy told us that he wanted everyone in the world to be able to find information on things like his daughter’s diseases and find the world’s experts on them. The day he got his daughter home from the hospital is the day Jimmy started Wikipedia.

Do you have a story like that? Wow. It’s the small things in life that matter. Small diseases. Unknown experts. A rant on objectification.

I got another small story. I had drinks with Joi Ito the other night. It’s been a long time since I saw him last (before I worked at Microsoft). Today he links to another person I met and some cool video she and her boyfriend shot at SXSW. Merci is her name. During the conversation she dropped in that she had been raised in a new-age cult. “Really? My mom is in one of those.” Turns out it was the same one that my mom is in! Small world. A connection has been made.

What’s your small story? How about we do a contest? 100 things that you won’t read about on Digg, Memeorandum, or TailRank? Wouldn’t that be fun?

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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