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Teen tweeter cashes-in on SUL placement
Tuesday, December 01, 2009 by Dave Winer.
BBC: "A Twitter feed set up by a Dutch teenager as a hobby has been taken over by Microsoft news channel MSNBC.com." 
The report emphasizes the rate that the feed is growing, by 3000 to 4000 followers per day. What it doesn't say is that the feed is on Twitter's Suggested Users List, and that growth is normal for feeds on the list, even ones that aren't run by prodigious teens.
Editorial comment: Might as well say that a Dutch teenager amazes his parents by traveling from Europe to America in a matter of hours. Without saying that he booked a flight on KLM. :-)
We live in a time of pseudo news.
Another observation. It would be interesting to know how much Microsoft paid for his feed. That would, right there, establish the monetary value of SUL placement.
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Dave Winer, 54, 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 Berkeley, California.
"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.
Dave Winer
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.Last update: 12/1/2009; 4:31:09 PM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."
