Dave Winer is an incredibly interesting person. I just read that he's shutting down Scripting News and then went to bed. But I couldn't sleep. I just have to write down my thoughts. There's no one else that has this effect on me.

An indirect cause of the shutting down of Scripting News is Sam Ruby starting a wiki “to describing a conceptual data model of what constitutes a well formed log entry”. I am participating too, and one of the reasons is that I see a lot of room for technical improvement on RSS 2.0. I think a lot of people agree. Actually I see room for technical improvement in OPML and XML-RPC too. And I know I am not the only one. And Dave Winer knows it:

Disclaimer: I make shitty software and I write shitty specs, but for all that shittyness, they're amazingly popular and somewhat useful. [Scripting News]

Most of the experiments I did on this websites involves one of Dave Winer's technologies. How does this work:

1. I want to experiment and show it to the world.
2. The world reads Scripting News.
3. I experiment with Dave Winer technology.
4. Dave Winer sees my experiment and puts it on Scripting News.
5. The world sees my experiment.

#2 and #4 is what's special about Dave Winer. There's no other name that you can insert in this list and make it still work. For some reason Dave Winer is able to maintain a constant high volume stream of interesting information on Scripting News. He has good ideas, a nose for good ideas and the ability to discover good ideas in high volume. It must be incredible hard work to keep that up.

Give it some thought. This is what it would look like if there were no Scripting News. What would it be worth to you, not in monetary terms, but in support terms, to keep this going. [Dave Winer]

Dave, my life wouldn't be half as interesting as it is today if it weren't for you. I wouldn't have met Adam Curry. And most importantly, I wouldn't be working at Q42. You bet I'm going to give it some thought.