Scripting News: Coral reefs, the saga continues

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

Coral reefs, the saga continues

Bravetrail asks how many coral reefs do fish need?

The answer is of course that we only need one coral reef.

But a federated server that ties into Twitter would not be a new coral reef, it would be part of the Twitter coral reef.

Just as 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...

Well I've gotten too far ahead of reality. There is no announced deal, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens. This is the main reason I've been uncomfortable with a company (Feedburner) trying to make a business out of the centralizing something that only works if its decentralized.

And I'd feel much more comfortable if a publishing company bought them, than a technology company. Publishing companies tend to accept technology as-is, technology companies, often try to play a game of lock the user in the trunk.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:48 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