Moral High Ground

Authored by Michael Pate on June 23rd, 2004 at 11:13 AM

Recently, visitors and users of free sites hosted at weblogs.com saw the following message.

This site is for people with sites that used to be hosted at weblogs.com. 1. I can’t afford to host these sites. I don’t want to start a site hosting business. These are firm, non-negotiable statements. 2. There are several commercial Manila hosting companies, including weblogger.com. Thomas Creedon maintains a list of commercial and free hosting services. If you want to have your site hosted more cheaply, consider the possibility of forming a co-op of some kind. 3. If you want a copy of your weblogs.com-hosted website, post a comment here, include the URL of the site. Sometime after July 1, 2004, I will export all the requested sites, without their membership groups. You can then download them and do with them as you wish. I won’t export them before July 1, and this is a one-time offer. - Dave Winer

Due to the efforts of Halley Suitt, Jeaneane Sessum and Shelley Powers, the story got a lot of attention. It was picked up by Slashdot, Wired, and the Associated Press. This meant that those people who Dave was hosting that he could not contact now have little excuse to not knowing about the change.

Fortunately, the story has a mostly positive ending. Rogers Cadenhead, a fellow member of the RSS Advisory Board, has stepped in to the vacuum and created Buzzword.Com. There will be some permalink breakage, but that was sort of inevitable at some point.

The cool thing about the blogosphere is that everyone gets to express their opinion. The uncool thing is when they get savaged for it.

And a few people did know what was happening, notably Evan Williams from Blogger. Voices of moderation and experience should immediately float to the top. What do Jeaneane Sessum and Halley Suitt know about server outages? Now Shelley Powers should know, and should have added reason, and her statements should get special scrutiny, because she is a technologist and a good one. She surely knew what she was doing, and that she didn’t have enough information to make the sweeping condemnations she was issuing. She did more to hurt the users of weblogs.com free hosting than the outage did. Her friends, Suitt and Sessum provided the quotes for others, but Shelley provided them with the confidence they were on strong technical ground when they weren’t. - Dave Winer

Shelley is angry. I can’t say I blame her. My only excuse is that when stories like this get so disjointed by being spread across so many sites by so many people I manage to miss a great deal of it until later. Like how Dave was offering techniques with which to launch personal attacks. Dave always finds that when someone else attacks his actions, the easiest response is to attack that individual.

From my perspective, Dave comes out of this looking badly. But the latest effort, linking what happened with Six Apart to this incident is interesting. Both were caused by a total lack of understanding of the basic tenets of communication.

But what does this mean in the broader sense? I think it means that anyone who is relying on a Userland Product needs to be concerned. Many people seem to be still unaware of the recent restructuring.

And I think it also has implications for the syndication debate. Individuals and companies change. Motivations change. Reasoning changes. People change. There is a reason that standards bodies exist. They may not be the fastest or the easiest or the most-loved solution to the problem, but they are the safest.

After this, I wouldn’t use RSS for anything that mattered. And I don’t see why anyone else would, either.

I don’t normally turn off comments, but I just don’t feel like getting attacked here this morning. If you want to comment on this one, feel free to link.