Winer vs. Communication
Tuesday, June 15th, 2004 by MR
Dave Winer, inventor of the
syndication format known as RSS
and former-proprietor of Userland
software, shut down close to 3000 weblogs this week after releasing
a statement noting that the financial burden of hosting these free
weblogs was finally too much to bear.
Moments after the shutdown, the user outcry reverberated around the web
community (as well as Blogdex,
where at one point, the top 10 most blog-linked websites were under the
weblogs.com domain name) and the
response was overwhelmingly negative.
What I take issue with is Winer’s total disregard for the bloggers he shut out. For a man who claimed for years to be the best friend of the user, this sure is an [expletive] move. I suppose I shouldn’t be suprised, though.
— A Small Victory
Winer has been hosting “Manilla-powered” weblogs without cost to the
owners for years, and although he attempted to give owners fair warning,
people say it wasn’t enough. did not give them any warning before deleting them all. [Ed. Updated on June 17]
…it would have been decent of him to give notice ahead of time to allow people to back up their sites and restart them elsewhere.
— Outside the Beltway
In response to the backlash, Winer released a personally-recorded MP3 transcript where he tried to mend ties with fellow bloggers who felt
betrayed by the situation.
Without going into too much detail, the stress of keeping servers running for users that expect free service, it’s just a deadly combination for me. It’s no fun, it’s highly stressful, and it literally is dangerous given my health situation.
— Dave Winer
Many users felt as though Winer selectively deleted weblogs, only
keeping the most important and popular ones alive. After bloggers
noticed that Doc Searls’ and Robert Scoble’s sites weren’t deleted, many
loyal Manilla users cried foul play.
What I’m most interested to find out about is that the sites at radio.weblogs.com and some other blogs like that of Doc Searls are still functioning.
— The Media Drop
Our Thoughts
Hosting costs money, money doesn’t grow on trees. It was gracious of
Dave to let users host their weblogs for free but it was obvious he
couldn’t maintain that state forever.
What was extremely unfortunate was that a great deal of the people who
lost their weblogs had no idea this deletion was coming. Winer may have
sent out an email to his users, but somewhere along the way,
communication was extremely botched up. Most of the people using
weblogs.com as their “blogging place” probably do not understand about
the technical issues associated with hosting so many free weblogs, and
needed assistance in order to transition themselves over to another
hosted service.
What this all boils down to is a breakdown in communication, and the
public relations nightmare which followed. The situation could have
been handled better on both sides, but at least this shows how important
communicating with your users/customers is.
Our Solution
Dave mentions that he couldn’t have given people 2 weeks notice
because the server was not meant for that and he was unsure of what
would happen. The beauty of the blogosphere and being as popular as Dave
is that he could have asked the question openly of how to go about the
situation (maybe not explain it in detail so the server gets overloaded)
and I have no doubt he would have received plenty of help.
href="http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2004/06/15/learning-from-past-experience/">Shelley has been trying to get to the root of the matter so that she could offer
her solutions. However, the lack of information seems to be preventing
her from doing so.
Even though Dave is an individual and not a company this does provide
an important lesson for all of us as did the whole SixApart-MT licensing
situation that happened not too long ago. In both cases, users aren’t
upset over the technicalities of what happened (nobody expected both
weblogs.com and MT to be free forever), but no one was pleased with the
lack of communication on the parts of Dave and SixApart.
href="http://www.dashes.com/anil/2004/05/19/moving_forward">Anil
stood up and took the blame for SixApart, and tried to help rectify part of what
went wrong, and his apology was very well-received. It will be interesting to see if Dave does the same.
Update: Wired article regarding the shutdown.
Reader Comments
17 Responses to “Winer vs. Communication”
“Shelley has been trying to get to the root of the matter so that she could offer her solutions. However, the lack of information seems to be preventing her from doing so.”
Excuse me, but I’ve read Dave Winer for some 4 to 6 years now, and I’ve known Ms. Powers EXTREMELY well, personally, in the recent past.
There is certainly a lack of information in this regard, if you think Shelley would do ANYthing to help, in ANY of these matters.
Yes, lack of ACCURATE communication, in most-all cases, causes these kinds of situations.
The rudeness of ALL parties just makes it plainly obvious, that most are not interested in much-a anything besides hearing themselves talk, and getting congratulated for their pseudo-wisdom.
Iow, this case is same-ole same-o..
Pick a side, and fight the “bad guys”…
Good infotainment for all the intellectuals, but moruva time-waste than anything… Like blogs, in general.. to over-generalize but not by much!!
I’ll agree with Shel about one thing: Yeah, there are lessons to be learned, but not the ones that she’s sellin’…!
She deleted the posts (or mine, anyhoo) today on her blog that gave some pointers.
Wonder why?
;-D
June 15th, 2004 at 8:03 pm
I think it has to do with my replies on the link above.
As well as my reply to Liz Tracey, which was, succinctly:
The object lesson to BE learned is that is no free lunch. And I said in another post she deleted that a whole LOTta this is a socialogical curve that the Hippy Generation of parents has led all of us down: Things sure ARE more fun, when there are no expectations involved. Coding programs is no exception, as Roger Benningfield said in his post that I replied to. (Funny irony, in THAT one!)
Link to Shelley comment
(’Course, that ain’t reality but reality hasn’t been one of Shelley Powers’ long suits, lately.)
:
In fact, I’m relatively certain it was either that, or my starting to participate in the Atom-syntax listserv, which she helped miscreate.
June 15th, 2004 at 8:39 pm
Does anyone else see the irony of Dave Winer’s recorded message? He says he chose to record a message because people don’t read essays. If people don’t read essays what hope is there for weblogs?
Dave’s a pioneer, no doubt. And a generous one at that. But it’s hard to justify the handling of this situation. I agree with the original post. If he needed help he should have asked. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would have been happy to assist.
June 15th, 2004 at 9:27 pm
I’ve seen plenty of sites get help from the “little people” that make it a community. From my end, it’s mostly on the political blogs.
Someone says, “I need help, here’s the sitch.” And like that there are thousands of people couching up 5$, 10$, 15$ a piece and very soon the person who needed the help has more than they need.
No one likes asking for help, but I feel that the ones who do ask are interested in preserving the community that has been built, whatever the cost to ego. I don’t know to what extent ego was involved in the initial decision to pull the plug, but to me it speaks to a lack of faith in the community.
June 15th, 2004 at 10:03 pm
That the hosting was provided for free is totally irrelevant. The fact is that a lot of folks lost service with no warning whatsoever. There are a variety of things Dave could have done to minimize the bungling from asking Userland to help out, asking others to help, giving notice of what was happening, etc. Dave did none of that. Dave also did not express a shred of contrition. Not once did he say “I’m sorry”.
June 16th, 2004 at 2:41 am
Just another example of poor communication being at the root of a massive, avoidable problem.
To many (all?) bloggers, having your entire archive of entries and comments deleted with little to no warning is devestating. I truly can’t believe that he didn’t even apologize.
June 16th, 2004 at 9:02 am
I updated the entry to include the recent Wired article.
June 16th, 2004 at 3:41 pm
In the article above you wrote a heading called “Our Solution”. What is your solution?
June 16th, 2004 at 4:44 pm
A quick blockquote for some contextual reference:
The beauty of the blogosphere and being as popular as Dave is that he could have asked the question openly of how to go about the situation (maybe not explain it in detail so the server gets overloaded) and I have no doubt he would have received plenty of help.
I apologize for not being as specific as we probably should have been. If the situation were up to us, we would have asked the users what they thought of the debacle, before acting on any decision.
First topic of blog posting: how to export your data from your weblogs.com weblog. Which other hosted blog services can import this data (be it Squarespace, TypePad, etc.), and then link to available resources which outline the process step by step.
Second topic of blog posting: Real justification for the shutdown. Money? Personal issues? Corporate political stuff? Just don’t like weblogs anymore? The goal is to be honest with your audience, they’ll appreciate that.
Third topic of blog posting: The apology. Make it sincere, understand that losing a weblog is a traumatic process for some, and show some empathy and support.
I hope that clears it up a bit. Feel free to email me if you’d like to discuss this topic a bit more.
June 16th, 2004 at 5:48 pm
You guys all missed the point. It was in one-a the posted Shelley Powers deleted.
This is about picking sides, and fighting the “bad guys”.
Dave did get help, and IS getting help.
Could he have handled the situation better…? Sure!
Could your writings above be a little less-hateful-and-against-Dave-Winer?
Well, it’s always easy to “see the light” in regards to what somebody ELSE does, right? (Which is what I did at BurningBird today, but that post has probably already gotten the axe.)
Gotta run, so my haste is prolee makin’ waste…;-D
June 16th, 2004 at 7:06 pm
Note: The second J. Toran comment has been deleted for being off-topic (as of 9:20pm Eastern Time).
Hi, J. We tried to keep our report above as objective as possible, however the reality of the situation is that many people lost their weblogs, and are now up in arms.
We simply wanted to provide factual evidence and quotes to our readers, and then discuss some strategies as to how we would have handled the situation. That is all.
June 16th, 2004 at 9:22 pm
There’s a very important inaccuracy in this piece. You state:
…although he attempted to give owners fair warning, people say it wasn’t enough.
Where was this warning? There was no warning.
In fact, Dave Winer in his audio blog entry and in comments on Scripting.com yesterday implicitly stated that he considered giving warning, and decided against it.
In fact, the audio blog entry makes clear that this was a spur of the moment decision — not something planned ahead of time. The discussion of “warning” in the audio blog implies that a rollback to Userland or a low-performance temporary solution on Dave’s servers was possible, but was deemed infeasible.
I’ve had these moments before, and the very most important thing to do is not to lose your head: Even if we stipulate that Dave made the right practical decision from a technical and situational standpoint, there are still ways that this could have been handled far, far better. For example, he waited something close to three days before offering any explanation of his reasons for the change. Within 24 hours of that time, there were a lot of solutions, workarounds, ands assistance offered.
I’ve been responsible for public websites and web applications since 1997, and one of the very first things I learned is that early notification of problems will go a long way toward soothing the savage beast of criticism. Pre-emptive notification is even better. Dave Winer rejected those ideas; he’s not the first person I’ve seen make that decision, and it’s just wrong. Forget about the ethical level, let’s just talk pragmatics: Think how much more quickly things would have been handled — and how much less acrimonious the “debate” would have been — if Dave had immediately put out word that there was a problem. His “people will jump up and down no matter what I do” perspective strikes me as the perspective of someone who’s at the end of his tether; at a time like that (and again, I’ve been there — you don’t spend 7 years in this business without being there), you need to remember that it’s never as bad as it seems, there’s always someone you can call on, even if it’s your users (after all, they may have more at stake than you!).
That this was a bonehead (as in thick-skulled, insensitive, lacking foresight) move is really not in serious debate.
So, yeah, let’s just move beyond this: The “important” blogs will get moved, the ones that are just “referer spam” will get killed (despite the fact that people clearly think they’re still of value), and the problems will be unpleasant history. The most lasting damage will be to a reputation that didn’t need anymore hits. Especially troubling, because large parts of that reputation are very good.
June 17th, 2004 at 9:38 am
Eric, thank you very much for bringing up that issue. It was an oversight on our part, and it was just edited in the original entry.
What many people are taking away from this (which is definitely a good thing) is that there definitely were things Dave could have done to alleviate some user pain.
Giving an explanation the day it happened is one thing. Pre-emptive explanation (as you said) is another. Finding other blog services for his users is a third. The list could go on and on.
People may argue that hindsight is 20/20, however, having a good sense of communication and business would have stopped this catastrophe before it started.
June 17th, 2004 at 11:08 am
It is interesting to see all the whining over the loss of a FREE service.
Like Dave I have had serious health problems for some 10 years. In that time though I couldn’t work due to my physical condition I could help out at a few voluntary orgs. However, earlier this year I had a particular severe attack which has yet to abate, the effect of which is to immobilise me for periods ranging from hours to days with extreme chronic pain. I had to cease my voluntary work with immediate effect meaning that I actually informed the organisations after I had had to stop working for them. Their attitude, even though my loss would cost them the wages of an experienced administrator which they would now need to employ, was one of thanks for past services and best wishes for the future. They still keep in touch and visit me and when possible I help out the Admin they have employed remotely even though it is a rare day I can help.
Unlike Dave and his heart problem, apart from the fact that stress is bad for most health problems, I am not a potential corpse just yet. Unless you have been in a situation where your life is actually under threat from your work then nobody here can possibly comment for until you have been in that situation you have no clue as to what Dave was actually going through as I can well understand that on seeing the workload presented it was easier to pull the plug there and then. As to the comment that he took three days to give an adequate reason, if you read it you would see that he had and was still visiting the doctor over that period, of course your precious blog must come before Dave’s health mustn’t it. And all the negative comments going the rounds is really going to help Dave’s health, well done folks.
I should declare that I have no interest in blogs and cannot see the attraction and until I read an e-week story had not heard of Dave and only vaguely of weblogs.com, but this seems typical of the web, give someone something for free and the takers seem to think you owe them for life. Grow up folks, if your blog is that important to you what are you doing hosting it on a free site, for instance I use yahoo and Hotmail for general purpose e-mail, news-lists and the like but for my important e-mails I use my domain hosted by a very large company with a good track record. As the saying goes ‘you get what you pay for’.
So to all you who have profited from Dave’s generosity over the years say thank you and move on.
June 19th, 2004 at 2:12 pm
Another inaccuracy in the above account is the statement that Dave Winer “invented” RSS. This is false — Netscape invented RSS. It can be fairly said that Userland did play a role in adopting and popularizing the format, but that’s not “invention”.
June 20th, 2004 at 4:53 am
Hi, Alex, thanks for the clarification.
I think many people equate the invention of an XML content syndication format with Dave because of his original (and proprietary) format. Just before Christmas in 1997 Dave talks about it on his weblog.
Even though the emerging RSS standard was first used by Netscape’s personalized content portal, they worked with Winer to bridge the two incompatible formats into RSS 0.91. Netscape originally had RDF metadata in its format, but ended up modifying it to work with Winer’s many tags in order for the two to play nicely.
So to make a long story short, Netscape and Dave Winer both worked together to popularize the new 0.91 RSS format, like you said. This comment was definitely not to disagree with you, but to drop some more background information for readers who may be unfamiliar with the back story surrounding the origins of RSS.
Thanks again for the comment.
June 20th, 2004 at 2:28 pm
Blog Hosting
Sorry to all that lost their blog in this fashion. I’ve been writing more articles about blog hosting lately, free and paid host options. I personally pay for a blog domain and hosting, it gives me more control over the micro business that my blog is. I think we will see a clear divide where personal bloggers will mostly use free blog hosting and business bloggers will pay for their hosting in the future of blogging.
February 4th, 2005 at 8:49 am
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