I thought reading about Winer was interesting. His story on how he became widely known was pretty cool, he basically had an epiphany that actually got him somewhere. At first, I think his very first idea with the whole email discussion and Bill Gates was a little strange, I certainly would not want to be in that kind of discussion, because you don't choose who you reply to, Winer does. I guess that is ok when it comes to meeting new people, but it's not something I would do. On the other hand, his second idea Davenet seemed very similar to something we have today... Facebook. You can ask people similar to you to join, and you can post anything you want on your weblog and not have to worry about anyone being more interesting than you because everyone can have a voice online. To me, Mark Zuckerburg only invented the name Facebook, not the idea, I think Dave Winer invented Facebook.
The downside to Winer is that I think he is a huge coward. For his entire career, he wrote about how people shouldn't just sell their idea, they should sell it and make people want it. So when he would attend a conference, and the speaker only tried to sell their idea, Winer would heckle each and every speaker, and would be basically told to sit down and shut up. So, with his Davenet idea, he expressed that everyone could basically 'heckle' (for lack of a better word) anyone and everyone and everything they wanted to, and not be told to shut up. So when someone decided to heckle Winer himself, what did Winer do? He shut down his blog and hid away. Someone even wrote that he could not even 'eat his own medicine'.
I like his idea about Davenet, where everyone has a voice and can put their own interestes and opinions on the internet and not be told to shut up, but the way that Winer acted when someone targeted him was childish, and I kinda lost a little respect for him. At least Mark Zuckerburg stood tall and proud even when he was at his darkest hour.
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