Rodent Regatta

Do you ever wonder if there’s a place on the Internet where you can find people arguing about their designs of drive trains for automobiles? Surely, somewhere, there’s a set of weblogs where flames are firing back and forth concerning some arcane aspects of torque, power, RPM’s, etc. Likely as not, they’re also flaming each other in a he-said-she-said fashion.

I’m glad I’m not so interested in my automobiles that I feel inclined to listen to the designers’ squabbles. Instead, I just want a better car every few years. I don’t need to know how they did it, just that they did it.

I’ll be able to tell. The car will be more powerful or more comfortable or it will feel as if it drives more safely. Perhaps it will get better mileage to boot.

There’s something equivalent to a drive train behind the scenes of weblogging. The General Motors, Chrysler and Ford of weblogging are probably Six Apart, Userland and Blogger, but not necessarily in that order. Suppliers to these companies are small companies and individual developers who deal with the real ”guts” of software under the hood. RSS is an example technology. I’m sure there’s an alphabet soup of others – UDI, SOAP, FOAF, XML, OPML, XML-RPC, RDF, API, ad nauseum…

I’m merely a user. I drive Movable Type from Six Apart. As long as real, user-oriented and understandable improvements are made to that product, I’ll keep using it, donating money and paying for products from that company. I also subscribed for another year to my Radio Userland account. Absent any plan to use that account at this point, I don’t know why I paid, but I did.

My point? Some tremendously knowledgeable and talented people seem to be arguing over things as mundane as whether the transmission will be fastened to the car with metric or english bolts. Worse than this is that part of the debate seems to be about the manner in which each party voiced his support for metric or english!

The users don’t care – only the programmers care! Until someone speaks up and says, here’s the feature, function and benefit of what we’re debating, users are going to grow progressively more frustrated with this whole debate and the web will be left to the techies. Some techies may even prefer this, but, trust me here, that won’t pay the bills!

You want weblogging to succeed in a really meaningful, money-making way? Provide genuine benefits to individuals and businesses and then support them for all you’re worth. They’ll be loyal to you forever.

Otherwise, the so-called BigCo will step in, if for no other reason than the BigCo can make a decision – right or wrong and move on. The reason they can make a decision is they’re a for-profit entity seeking to provide owners with a return. They don’t have the luxury of endless, intellectual sniping.

For those savvy programmers/developers who have managed to lay low with their heads down getting meaningful work done, we, the customers scream, ” T H A N K S ! ”