Dave Winer: Twitter is bleeding the blogs
by Henry CopelandSunday, December 2nd, 2012
Dave Winer, a trailblazer in blogging software and all around visionary when it comes to the social web, is increasingly pessimistic about the survival of small and niche blogs in the face of Twitter’s “140-character grunts and snorts.” By extension, Winer sees diminishing coverage of important information niches. He sees a possible solution, networking, but thinks its unlikely: “If we could do more networking on a more regular and systematic basis, that would create incentives for more people to do it [blog], and would build flow independent of Twitter. But blogs work like everything else. Installed leaders don’t generally help upstarts.”
Dave was amazingly prescient in foretelling the exponential wave of people-powered publishing that started with blogging and rolled on through Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram et al. This post from early 1995, titled “Billions of websites,” included this passage: “Every writer can participate in the web. Someday, very soon, I believe, every writer will. That’s the next big opportunity in the online world.”
