Ted Leung, smartly, opines regarding the current tempest in a teapot about weblogging/personalpublishing/lightweight CMS software:
I'm not going to try to predict which community of blog software developers will be able to align their interests with the interests of a large portion of the blogosphere. I hope that at least one of them will try. In order to put an end to Us versus Them, Us must become Them, and Them must become Us.
The issue at play in the 6A/MT discussion is that only half that bargain happened, and the other half didn't. Users in the MT community believed that in their usage they owned the core of MT, that their usage was the heart of the product.
Of course, as can be seen, they owned not the heart of the product, but in the community they owned the spirit. The heart itself moves on its own rhythm, and that rhythm can drive the rest of the body.
While we believed there was an Us that included All of Us, it really was Us and a baby bird that happened to have investors and employees. Not necessarily a Them, but not quite an Us either.
Only a week out, even in Internet Time , is far too early to see how this will play out.
But bearing the issues of Community and Us and Them and Commons in mind will help to understand, I suspect.
Posted by esinclai at May 17, 2004 07:05 AM |