Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
A couple of items of gossip. It seems that AOL is unleashing its folks on weblogging. According to Jeff Jarvis:
Yesterday, I was one of a privileged council of blogging elders – Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, Clay Shirky – invited to see AOL’s new blogging tools, which will be released later this year.
…
Starting weblogs allows the audience to create content and to market and to create value.
That’s why it’s a big deal that AOL is blogging
I remember AOL and Usenet and all those naïve users dumped on to the Usenet groups, coming close to all but destroying some of them. Now we have potentially the same thing happening to weblogging and all people can see is marketing and business, new social software vistas, and, more importantly – more people weblogging. Quantity! Content! More content to mine and to sell and to morph into RSS/XML.
Bah and bullshit.
Want to know what it will be like having AOL members online? The rules will change, starting with the fact that the AOLers won’t know who Jeff Jarvis, Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, and Clay Shirky are – and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
This leads me to my second item of gossip – John Robb left Userland. I’ve battled a time or two in the past with John Robb about technology, and I never would have expected him to leave, not while the company is still running. What’s more interesting, though, is that his weblog pages are gone – completely gone. So, who removed them? John, or someone else? One flick of a button on a machine, and John is effectively erased from weblogging.
John, wherever you are, whatever you are now, I wish you luck in your new career.
Looking at this, perhaps having all that fresh new blood from AOL – all without their little weblogging heros and talk about weblogging and this conference and that and all with little or no interest in the politics of weblogging – will be a good thing. A very good thing.
Here’s hoping for complete and utter anarchy.