Hateration and projection
I’m always troubled by those who are so insistent on rubbishing any new thing that comes down the pike. And so it has gone, predictably, with Dave Winer’s River of News idea and implementation.
Lots of people hate on Dave (”Dave Winer? Most aptly named man in the universe,” sniffed one internet industry CEO the very first time I met him and happened to mention Winer’s name) and seem unable to play the ball, not the man. Bob Stepno nails the way these people think and reason, with their “This is nothing new, no big deal” attitude:
Back when Jimmy Carter was president, anyone with a big computer downstairs and thousands of dollars in wire service subscriptions could read a daily ‘river of news’ on our computer screens.
My own theory is that the rubbishers are scared. They are afraid to look as if there’s something they might not know. I’ll never forget the time that a techie friend of mine who wasn’t very au fait with blogs tried to look clever by saying, “They’re called wikis, not blogs.” He got rather tetchy when I tried to tell him otherwise, and accused me of being oversensitive. Projection, anyone? I’d hazard a guess that none of these critics have come up with much innovation themselves - and they know it.
To be enthusiastic and positive is to risk something, and these people don’t do risk. Consequently, they don’t do reward very often, either.
Filed under: Happiness, Life, News, Technology, Work
Is it always unfair, then, to note when something that’s proclaimed as being new really isn’t? Regardless of one’s feelings about Dave Winer, creating simple pages for mobile browsers has been happening from a long time– from the first order pages like Dave’s (which *have* been around for a LONG time) to other notions like FeedBurner’s rendering of RSS streams as HTML for regular browsing devices. All of these things provide the River of News– some of the sites Dave has created the river for have themselves already been providing such pages for years!
I remember having to create “Rivers of News” pages for the very first site I ever built– and I’ve always had some kind of syndicated stream since– like many I’m having a hard time seeing what it is that is worthy of note here beyond the obvious (that every site should provide pages suited to mobile browsers)?