Dave Winer is a weblog guru. He founded Userland, makers of the popular blogging Radio software (adopted en masse by Salon and the Berkman Center, among others). He's the driving force behind RSS, one of the two leading standardized formats for web content "syndication."
Winer is also the creator of Weblogs.com, which works as a directory of recently-updated weblogs. In its earlier years, Weblogs.com was an adjunct to Userland and also offered free subdomain-based weblog hosting: that is, you could set up a Radio blog and have it hosted at myblog.weblogs.com. The free-hosting offer was turned off after a while, and after Winer left Userland, he took over the hosting himself. It turned out to be a bigger server load than expected.
Yesterday, Winer buckled under the stress and shut off the hosting. For more on the monumental stupidity of this decision, see inside . . .
The Story
There's a distinction you learn in your first semester at law school that sheds some light on the rights and wrongs of the situation. Generally speaking, you have very few affirmative duties towards others. If you see someone lying face down in a puddle, you have no legal obligation to roll them over. However, if you start a course of action to help someone else, you have to see it through to a safe stopping point. If you start to roll the guy in the puddle over and break his arm in the process, you're in trouble. In fact, once you start rolling him over, you may not be allowed just to leave him lying there, especially if there were other people around who assumed that Mr. Puddle-Face was in safe hands once you started intervening.
Winer was doing the roughly 3,000 weblogs.com people a favor by giving them free hosted blogs. He was doing them a double favor by personally hosting their blogs after he left Userland. For this, he deserves (and generally has received) their thanks. But once he created those blogs and especially after he took over their DNS and their files, he had a serious obligation not to leave them in the lurch. An obligation he completely bungled.
The policy reasons that the law will punish incomplete (or incompetent) volunteers are morally applicable here. First, people act in reliance on the volunteer's good conduct -- here, the continued existince of their blogs. Had they known that the switch might be thrown at Winer's whim, they might have chosen to host somewhere else. Had they even had warning of the switch, they might have evacuated their content first.
Second, people who aren't prepared to do a minimally competent job shouldn't start risky courses of action that might hurt others if bungled. Winer took over the hosting over six months ago. No one made him do it. He could have thrown up his hands then, let people evacuate their content, helped them redirect to their new homes, and closed the site down gracefully. Instead, he plowed ahead, confident he could do a good job. Now that he's overwhelmed, the damage is much worse than if he'd never tried to be the hosting guy.
Winer's technique of announcing the change, too, leaves an awful lot to be desired. He blew away access to all of the blogs, replacing them all with a generic announcement. Actually the announcement itself didn't explain his reasoning. For that, users had to listen to a ten-minute, 3.76-megabyte MP3 file. Winer explained his choice thusly:
My feeling is that people generally don't read essays, and, uh, and, um, you know so if you want to present a subtle idea, that's not a really good way to do it.
Oh, the arrogance. In the first place, this "essay" is only around a thousand words (my sketchy transcript of it runs to seven hundred). It takes a minute or two to read, as opposed to the ten minutes of audio (complete with pauses and coughing fits). (If you're on a 28.8 modem, the file itself will take eighteen minutes to download; so much for the non-broadband world). Just as importantly, the only subtlety that audio adds to the process is the ability to hear the frustrated misery in Winer's voice; it certainly doesn't enable him to explain, why, for example, his crisis of timing wasn't wholly predictable. And wasn't part of the blogging revolution about the universality of text and interconnectability of hypertext? It's almost as though Winer is turning his back on blogging altogether.
The Moral
Perhaps none of the above should matter. Towards the end of his apology, Winer points out that he's a person, not a company. He's stressed and too busy; he doesn't have the time it would take to deal with the server load problem. People were going to complain no matter what he did. And his health won't permit him to deal with the difficulties of, say, keeping the pages accessible and having a transition plan that gets people to their new hosting locations.
On a personal level, all of the above are pefectly understandable. I feel sorry for Dave. Certainly, no one has a right to force him to sit down, spend his own money on bandwidth and servers, and spend his time rewriting the software to deal with the server load problems. No one owns Dave. Lots of people do good things for the world from the goodness of their hearts, and when these people make mistakes,get exhausted, we need to let them rest.
But this isn't entirely personal. Dave isn't just a guy doing a favor for the world. He's a self-proclaimed weblog authority. And he's a guy with a plan: to build out the Semantic Web with SOAP, RPC, XML, and above all, with RSS. He wants RSS to be universal; he's out there stumping for his design, and trying to convince us all that he should be calling the shots, that his baby should be the standard. He sounds off on RSS all the time; he tells us how RSS ought to be; he blusters about public use of his words; he suggests the elimination of rival formats. At stake in all of these is his professional credibility.
Dave Winer says something is technically feasible. Is it? Ask the guy who thought he could host 3,000 blogs and then realized it would take too much work. Dave Winer says his steady stewardship of RSS shows that his suggestions for its future directions are wise. Are they? Ask the guy who can't be bothered to work out a general transition plan and plans to archive individual blogs. Dave Winer says he has the best interests of the weblog community at heart. Does he? Ask the guy who prioritizes other things over his responsibility to the 3,000 Weblogs.com users. Dave Winer wants to be a public spokesman for weblog interoperability standards. Should he be the face of the movement? Ask the guy who explains his flake-out with an audio post and then has someone else carry his water.
Dave Winer says you can trust him. Can you?
UPDATE June 17 2:05 PM: Dave and some volunteers have worked out an improved transition plan. It includes data migration, 90 days of free trial hosting, and, with luck, redirection from the old URLs to the new ones.