Winer saw all that he had made, and it was very goodWeblogs and RSS and podcasts were created. By 2006, Winer had finished his work, and so he rested.
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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