Eye on Winer

Dave has an interesting post today about the problem with centralizing services on the web. He goes on to analogize this to the nature of “news” on the web. I think his first point is valid. It’s a major premise in much of computing that a single point of failure can cause an awful lot of problems. Whether that failure is technical, personal, or political makes absolutely no difference.

Arguing against centralizing users and data in one web service is easy to defend. Media is different.

Dave criticizes TechMeme because it’s the quintessential centralizer. What Dave neglects, though, are the benefits of centralization in the media.

In a web-service, the benefits of centralization are few: uniformity, economies of scale, a larger knowledge base, etc. These are trivial benefits that are far outweighed by the likelihood of a single point of failure, in fact, failing.

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Dave wishes that TechMeme had an item-level opt out.

Of course people would like to have an item-level opt-in, to guarantee a post would earn a top position on TechMeme, but obviously that’s impractical, so why not give us the power to say please don’t include this story in TechMeme, it’s too meta.

Gabe Rivera has said before that TechMeme will follow the Robots.txt spec, and Robots.txt has all the tools you need for item-level exclusion. Unfortunately, Dave can’t be bothered to understand the Robots.txt spec. Then again, there’s this:

[I]nstead of making me turn off the TM spider for my whole site, why not give me a way to say “Stop TechMeme spider, this item is off-limits.” We could come up with a TechMeme namespace for RSS 2.0. I’d be happy to help.

When the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.