Scripting News: Point of view is everything

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

Point of view is everything

Les Orchard: "Twitter becomes immensely interesting when it turns out that you've amassed a group of contacts who tend to run in similar circles as you, because even their off-handed remarks and random burps have a decent chance of surfacing something interesting or entertaining. When it's good, this sets up a nice ambient chatter like sitting in a coffee shop filled with just your kind of people."

That's exactly right. And he goes on to explain that's why when reviewers look at Twitter, or other networking systems (like blogs) they see them as mundane. But it's like listening to random phone conversations, you'd think the same thing. But suppose you were listening to a conversation among people you know?

Twitter isn't private, so it's not exactly like eavesdropping, but it is personal. These days on the Internet we're experimenting with various mixtures of private and public, subscriptions and ephemeral connections. Almost no one watches the main Twitter page, yet that's probably where most of the reviewers go.

The naive reviewer hasn't got much to offer these days.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:47 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.

Apr Jun