One thing about innovators…

by on August 25, 2006

Dave Winer frustrates me too. Why? Cause he shows me a world I didn’t know could exist. He challenges my assumptions. And, tries to get me to join his world. The baaahhhhssssstttttaaaaarrrrrddddd!!!

I remember when he showed me RSS. I thought to myself “isn’t that nice?” I couldn’t see why I’d use it. But, he kept at it. Everytime I’d be over his house (called “the Internet Hut” by my son) he’d show me RSS again, each time from a little different angle). I still didn’t get it.

Until one day when I realized I was spending most of the day visiting blogs in my Web browser. That was when I started asking him to show me RSS again. “Hey, Dave, can you show me that world outline idea I kept ignoring again?” It was almost two years from the time he first showed me RSS to the day I “got it.”

This week it’s river of news. Lots of lightbulbs are going on about why that idea is interesting. But it took Dave cutting it up, simplifying it, and coming back to us with different views of the same idea for us to get it. He first showed me River of News years ago. The bbbaaahhhhssssstttttaaaaaarrrrrdddddd!!!

Yeah, it does look effortless. But Dave is one of those guys who is tireless. He sees a vision of how the world should be and then tries to drag us all into his world.

It pisses a lot of us off. But, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Oh, and if you ever meet a true visionary they do have this frustration with the rest of the world. I remember hearing that frustration from Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse (it took us 25 years to get THAT innovation!)

Thanks to the innovators who keep showing us their world until we get it. Sorry for the friction and cluelessness when it occurs.

  • The problem that people have with Dave's latest "River of News" idea (it's not the first concept he's called "River of News" - he's also referred to a single-stream RSS aggregator by that name) is that it looks an awful like stuff that's been done before, and Dave hasn't explained it well. Doc's explaination of what it is and why it's important is much better.

    But the problem that I have is that it's simply not a good way of browsing news web sites on a mobile device. What you get at the top of the page is the latest news, not the most important news - compare and contrast the BBC's mobile site and BBCRiver to see what the difference is. With a site like the BBC, which delivers hundreds of stories per day, the most important story is likely to be one, two, or three pages down - and as user interface design has shown again and again, the more you make people scroll, the more readers you're lose.

    If you're checking news on a mobile device, you want to see the big story that happened a couple of hours ago at the top of the page - not the 10 minor stories that haved appeared since then and pushed it on to the second page on your Blackberry.
  • Dan
    Completely agree. Why does it take someone to do this out of frustration? Don’t these media companies understand that they are not serving these niches very well? And I would imagine these are not niches that you want to ignore. Who uses PDA’s and Blackberries the most? I have no stats, but I would bet it would be executives, business travelers, etc: people that advertisers tend to want to target, and media companies covet.
  • Um, so how come you're suddenly not Mr. "If it's not a full feed, i'm not reading it"? An aggretation of partial, headline only feeds doesn't make them magically more useable.
  • John: it's not the New York Times page that interests me the most. It's finally getting TechCrunch in a readable form.
  • The baaaaaastard also came up with podcasting as well!
  • MyNameIsMatt
    I don't know about this post. I'm not really familar with all of the specific technologies discussed, but it all sounds like someone watching TV, and seeing one of those new inventions like a new food chopper or something, and saying to their significant other sitting next to them, "I told you. I've been saying for years that we need something like that. They stole my idea." Ideas are great, but execution is everything.

    Someone posted in another blog about how one of Dave Winer's ideas was a limited version of something he created ten years before. And Dave's idea was revolutionary, while his wasn't, and he chalked that up to Dave's standing in the community. While that may have played a role, it's also likely that his idea was better, and that the limited-ness of the idea was a benefit.

    People become important in a community (and gain better visibility) because they understand a community's needs. Their ideas are more likely to please because they understand the subtleties of a community and how to cater a broad idea into something valuable. That's a major part of execution that the couch sitting TV watcher doesn't get. [Add a spring that makes it pop back out, and you'll sell millions. Don't and it won't float. Same idea, different results.]
  • MyNameIsMatt said: "People become important in a community (and gain better visibility) because they understand a community’s needs."

    Yeah, maybe. But it also has something to do with their willingness to shout about something the loudest and longest. I find many entrepreneurs and innovators to be overconfident and boorish. But honestly maybe these are required qualities. No joke. It doesn't necessarily make them great people though.
  • "The baaaaaastard also came up with podcasting as well!"

    Forgive me, I might be totaly misunderstanding the whole concept. But Podcasting is radio without the tuner. It's nothing new and Dave, bless his heart, didn't invent it.

    Unless you're bieng sarcastic in which case I agree entirely.
  • MyNameIsMatt
    Richard Querin said: "Yeah, maybe. But..."

    I'm not sure I agree with the shouting loudest and longest part. As a pundit on TV or a Wall Street analyst, sure. However, if you pick out the biggest and best blogs, I don't think you'll find those kinds of people, or if you do, then they're also probably right more often than not. Thinking back to Scoble's posts on A-list bloggers, they're not A-list because they're elistist, but because they provide value.

    Entrepreneurs are definitely overconfident and boorish because the odds are they'll fail, so they better be that way if nothing else. How else can they explain why they continue in the face of such obvious failure ahead. Still, I don't think that means they have to be abnoxious, and the successful ones are usually too busy being successful to really say something loudest and longest (unless you're in an establish community with a strong culture like in Microsoft or old media where changing can be harder than not, even if it's right).
  • Yeah, let's not give Dave too much credit for podcasting. He helped structrue it and gave us an easy way to automate part of it. But people have been doing digital audio long before Dave and the MTV guys gave it a cute name. Or, did people think Mark Cuban was always rich?
  • I'm not an innovator but I have--on a few occasions--correctly seen the future with "frustrating" clarity. Accordingly, I think you might enjoy my article, "How Digital Downloading, Podcasting, and Video I-Tunes Will Destroy The Entertainment Industry" which I posted today (August 25, 2006) at writingforfilm.com/Articles.

    Best Regards to you and yours.
  • I'm still failing to see the outstanding innovation of multiple feeds aggregated into one. It's convenient, but hell, 600 headlines? What good is it?
  • danja
    There's innovation and there's innovation...
  • Rex
    Dave Winer invented one thing, and then acts like a complete dinkus for the rest of his life. Being right about one thing and wrong about 3,000 other things -- how innovative.

    What's even worse is that the old-timers keep sticking up for the old coot, somehow trying to hedge against their obsolescence.
  • Danny, that's the coolest thing i've ever seen.
  • Rex: one thing? Let's see. More Outliner. XML-RPC. SOAP. Edit this Page. Blogging. RSS. OPML. World outline. News aggregator.

    What have you done? If it's even one cool thing I'll talk you up too.
  • LayZ
    Dude, your proving Rex's point. XML-RPC was forked off of SOAP. I think even Winer himself would admit this. (and actually I think he basically road the coat tails of a couple of MS people that were doing the actual heavy-lifting on this technology)
  • yeah if tech savvy folks in Valley take a while to get it, think about corporate IT and then a few years later, business executives?

    The sad thing is corporate America is under pressure to innovate and could use a lot of tech innvoation, but I find a growing chasm between innovation as the Valley defines it and usable innovation - see my post below.

    http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect...

    Unfortuantely a lot of web 2.0 community say the CIO just does not get it ..the fact is there is 10X more money in corporate IT than consumer IT...we have to reduce the latency between innovation in Valley and Main street
  • ... and podcasting.
  • Reuters, Bloomberg, and Thompson have been selling real-time streaming headline news to the financial community for at least fifteen years.

    Most traders read several scrolling headline views at once, one containing the unfiltered stream, one filtered based a basket of stocks or commodities, the list of instrument tags dynamically determined by the trader's current holdings. They also have a top stories view and usually a view for their favorite sports.

    Traders can take this real-time streaming news with them on their Blackberry using the Reuters Wireless Delivery System, http://about.reuters.com/productinfo/wirelessde....
  • It's not his innovations that frustrate the rest of us, it's the fact that Dave innovates with existing technology and then claims he invented it. Example: RSS; did he do most in the field to promote and get RSS excepted? Yes. Does most of the credit for getting RSS "out there" belong to Dave? Yes. Did he invent it? Nope. Does he tell the world he did invent it? Hell yeah! No wonder people get frustrated!

    Cheers,
    Gary
    http://www.garyshort.org/
  • LayZ: actually SOAP was forked off of XML-RPC. Go study the timelines.
  • Dave Winer doesn't frustrate me because "he shows me a world I didnt know could exist", but people he loudly proclaims to have recently invented a world that I've been living in for the past decade.
  • Dan: really? You had RSS in 1996? OPML in 1996? SOAP in 1996? XML-RPC in 1996? Edit this page in 1996? Damn, why didn't I know you in 1996?
  • I've added some stuff to opmlmanager.com which enables anyone to create their own rivers of news for mobile browsing.

    For more info: http://www.justplain.org/2006/09/02/mobile-brow...
  • It's ok - we'll wait for you to get it Robert :)
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