So I’m over in my hotel room - since the bandwidth is so shitty at the conference - but I wanted to post my initial thoughts on yesterday.

Dave Winer is a fucking genius and I love him.

He’s changed my life several times - and yesterday was another one of those days - one you know you’ll remember the rest of your life. It was a penultimate moment.

Thank god for us - that Broadband Mechanics invested in an on-line outliner called WebOutliner - 2 years ago when we partnered with Marc Barrot. The demo is still up and it fortells of an era of ‘Ajax’ tools, using Chlorox and Borax to clean up the world of software (sorry I just had to use that line - I’ve been waiting a while to use it

Dave never really got to show off Instant Outlining as a new dimension in instant messaging. But he did communicate what it’s all about and what’s coming - when a community and developers and users work together to define the spec of a product or new level of functionality.

Any site or tool can utilize OPML as both a contenta nd structure conduit. And by utilizing a natural, easy to use paradigm such as outlining, the combinaytion fo contenta nd structure editing - in teh same tool - will revolutionaize how web sites, servcies and applications - can evolve and grow.

At the core of these new kinds of tools are open standards (APIs and scehemas) surrounding teh notion fo micro-content. It’s what I’ve been syaing for a while. Microsoft started ot define Lists as a kind of micro-content - yesterday. SixApart has been building tools supporting Lists - for years.

Technorati showed off a new real-time level of functionality, while at the same time defining a new kind of micro-content - which they call microformats. And it’s not just Technorati, but a whole community of people. Their notion of the ‘lower case semantic web’ is that all the meta-data - is in the page.”

Dave showed off structure, content and meta-data - in a document yesterday. There’s plenty of other paradigms and metaphors which will be used to build the Web 2.0 and the semantic web. We can all live together - and make lots of money and deliver incredible, progressive, forward moving, compelling experiences to our users.

Most people didn’t quite grok the significance of showing a live outliner changing not only the content, but also the stucture of a web site - in a real-time interactive editing environment.

And few people saw see the tentcales, fingerprints and influence that Dave had in teh NEXT thing that happened - which was Microsoft announcing (in their own back yard) some extensions to RSS that have been wanting for years - like I did.

Dave blows me away. Through his life he’s sticked true to his ideals and notions of how software should be used, bought and sold (or not.) The communituy that swarms around him lurches and vears from him - like a torrent of believers lost in a chaos of politics and lust. I’ve been at the cor eof that community - while also reputing it.

But at the end of the day - Dave is one of our leaders. Not the only one, but certainly a major player. Thank you Dave.

So then in walks Microsoft with Scoble’s fingerprints all over it. The fact that Dave and Scoble quietly fight off of each other is brilliant marketing and brand development. Everyone knows that Scoble works for Microsoft and that Dave represents these incredible things that can happen - if they only could.

So yesterday shows what Dave was able to convince Microsoft to do - via Scoble. Incredible things hapened!

Sure some guys from IETF were complaining about the process, but we’re making this up as we go - folks - and I scrambled to play matchmaker between: Brian Dear and the Events folks, JD Lasica and the Media folks, Niall Kennedy and the Reviews folks, Mary Hodder (in abstentia) and the Tags teams, any aggregator vendor seen within 100 yards and (of course) the ID folks - who with Kim Cameron on their team - have a true leadership position in our community. That’s what I was up to - yesterday.

This is Microsoft firing on all cylindars.

It doesn’t matter whether their softare is open sourced, it’s their actions in the community that matter.

Now let’s see how they play with Yahoo and Google and us.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 25th, 2005 at 8:41 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.