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OUseful: "As requested by Library Clips, here is an OPMLify Page Links bookmarklet that will find all the links in a page and pop them into an OPML listing that you can cut and paste into a text editor, save (or perhaps prune and save) and then upload to your favourite OPML reader." FeedBlitz:"FeedBlitz now enables blog authors to syndicate OPML to subscribers by mail. OK, so what on earth does that mean, and why might you care?" Todd Cochrane: "Personally I like Dave Winer, I may not agree with everything he says all the time, but I at least listen and reflect on things he has to say and consider his view point important. With a growing blogging world and converging commercial interest Dave has stood the line and battled a great fight to halt commercial interest from compromising the RSS standard." Music and Lyrics Every human utterance has two parts: what you say and how you say it -- lyrics, and music. Most of OPML Fan is lyrics. What people said. Code people wrote. Links. Lately in OPMLville there's a lot of music. A crescendo amid the orchestra of voices. So, some music from me: I like Dave Winer. I feel that I have a lot to be thankful to him for. Because of the way he's lived his life, I, personally, have had more opportunity in my life in very concrete ways. Believe me, tech gatherings at Harvard weren't exactly open to housewives from the suburbs before Dave came. Without them, I would have stayed a personal blogger and never realized that I could do a lot more, even as a stay at home mother, to reach out to the world and Do Stuff, that I already had everything I needed. I can't think of anyone else who would have given people like me or Julie Leung the opportunity he gave us at the early Bloggercons. Would we be speaking at SXSW or Northern Voice or pursuing citizen journalism without the first push he gave us? Maybe not. Dave was willing to look beyond my life circumstances and give me an even chance to succeed. This wasn't because Dave was playing favorites, because Dave doesn't play favorites. It's because of the way Dave is. As I write this, I hear a wave of censorious voices in my head. Many people say that they don't like Dave (whether they actually know him or not). Dave is controversial. But in this particular way, I am like Dave: it's me, not anybody else, who decides who I like. It's not easy, because this means I have lots of friends who can't stand each other, and can't understand why I'm friends with someone else they don't like. I say to them, "Look at it this way: there's nothing anybody else can say to me that will make me stop being your friend." Sainthood is not a qualification to be my friend (though it's not a disqualification, either). Dave has talked recently about mothballing Scripting News. He pointed out that there was a point where he had come to the end of his previous online experiment, DaveNet. I don't know if Dave will move on from Scripting News or not, but I want to point out that those moves paralleled a major new creation on the web: the creation of the weblog, syndication, and the blogosphere. Maybe Dave's move heralds something new. Maybe there are little green shoots poking up out of the spring dirt that we haven't bothered to look down and see. Anyway, that's what I hope. But you know what? It doesn't matter! Dave, like everybody else, is going to do what's good for him. Blogs (and open source software) are free-will offerings. We pile up the good stuff on the porch with a FREE sign on it; people take it or don't, we add more to the pile or don't. But if it's forced, it's not a free will offering anymore. And if it's not free, it's not any good. Remember: Don't shoplift from the Free Store. |
Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 9:25 PM.
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