Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Feedback on www.userland.com?

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/5/1999; 8:34:40 AM
Topic:www.userland.com
Msg #:10604 (In response to 10603)
Prev/Next:10603 / 10605

I like the UserLand name too. Even after all these years, and a change in focus, it still works. The goal is still to empower users in ways other software companies won't or can't. Initially it was about viewing applications as programmable libraries. That really worked, it took longer to happen than I wanted, and there were some major disappointments, but in the net-net Monday morning view, it did work. Look at all the scriptable apps on the Mac. The arm-twisting paid off. What didn't work is that no economic system developed, and the Mac was drifting there was no effective promotion engine, not like the one that was around the Mac in the 80s.

OTOH, we're now on the cusp of having it *really* happen, in a much broader way than just on individual machines or to a lesser extent LANs. The Internet simplified what we mean by an application. It's much easier to make scriptable apps on the Internet, esp since most of the apps are built with scripting! And the bridge to COM is getting quite well-developed. We'd like to see the same thing happening on other platforms.

So UserLand still makes total sense. That's where we all live, even the software vendors who were late to the scriptable apps game. Now maybe DocServer can be broadened to do the same thing for Perl, Python, Tcl, etc. I am naive about this. Do they have websites that link together all their MAN pages into a search engine? If not, this is something we can do to add value to those communities, and it would obviously be good for business.

Dont' forget O'Reilly

More rambling.

BTW, in the Earthweb/Andover space, don't overlook the quiet giant, O'Reilly. They actually have a philosophy and a philosopher running the show, it's not an accident that there's a clear taxonomy to their site, and lots of interesting stuff can hang off their structure.

They raised the taxonomy issue in my head, and once I knew to look for it, I found it in a few minutes. In this redesign, the changes on the UserLand.Com home page were *easy* compared to the changes on the Frontier site and the challenge of building a store.

I was a hard-ass about keeping the Frontier business on the Frontier site, and not having it be the purpose for the home page. I have trouble within my own organization getting control of the top-level. Since most of them work on Frontier, naturally Frontier becomes the most important thing. But I have a bigger view, I want this site and company to grow around Frontier, not just be Frontier. In other words the name of the company is UserLand, not Frontier.

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