I admit to owning a couple of Douglas Rushkoff’s books, and he’s always struck me as 50 percent genius and 50 percent moron (and 100 percent self-promoter). Anyway, MetaFilter linked to an article Rushkoff wrote for Yahoo! Life, basically doing a lame rehash of a “the internet’s not about making money, it’s about connecting people” rant. Rushkoff writes,
Or have a look at Blogger. ItÂ’s not just a Web site; itÂ’s also a set of publishing tools that allows even a novice to create a Weblog, automatically add content to a Web site, or organize links, commentary, and open discussions. In the short time Blogger has been available, it has fostered an interconnected community of tens of thousands of users. These people donÂ’t simply surf the Web; they are now empowered to create it.
Sure, except that Blogger never made any money to pay for its expensive servers — aside from the sort of speculative investments that Rushkoff disparages throughout his article. In the end it had to be bailed out by Dan Bricklin’s company.
Same thing with Plastic and Slashdot, which Rushkoff also salivates over. How long will Plastic be around now that its parent company laid off pretty much everyone, and Slashdot is chained to the fortunes of VA Linux (another company that relied on speculative financing).
Because he’s so safely liberal, the main political site that Rushkoff mentions is the rather dull Alternet.Org, whereas there’s far more interesting experiments in sharing and connecting on sites like FreeRepublic.Com or EatTheState.Org, both of which are far more interesting than Alternet.
FreeRepublic is awful.