Scripting News: Update on UserLand

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Update on UserLand

After posting about the future of UserLand, a lot of comments, all constructive. What a change. It used to be that when we opened this kind of discussion, the users were crowded out by flamers. It feels in a way like we've popped the stack back to 1995 or so, when everyone in the then-nascent blogging world was full of excitement and hope, and the negative stuff hadn't shown up yet. The world was smaller then, and now it's smaller again. ";->"

This morning over coffee I reflected on how unusual this situation is. It's hard enough when a key person resigns, or your lawyer resigns, but I've never seen or heard of a situation where they stick around after they resigned and make unspecified demands. As some of the posters say, we hurt when people like Doug, Brent, Andre and Jake left, but they all went on to do other things, and either helped UserLand or at least stayed neutral. I certainly tried to help UserLand after I left. But this idea that Scott could get a new job, at a company that just raised $15 million in VC, and still stand in the way of cleaning up UserLand, is a mystery to me. Maybe once it's resolved I'll understand it.

I remarked in a comment yesterday: "The way this company is structured, the people who are central to the support of the product have no stake in its success other than they get to use it. For a company that has played such a central role in leveling those kinds of structures, it has a pretty conventional structure of its own."

With so little to lose, it seems, we could make some big changes, and try creating a company that rewards its community when it succeeds, in a more substantial way.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:36 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Feb Apr