Remember Pointcast?
: Seven years ago, Dave Winer reminds himself, he loved Pointcast.
I hated it: an unnecessary application with unnecessary complication that caused unnecessary traffic with a bad business model (remember: it was the screensaver with content and advertising; it was going to be talking to empty chairs while its consumers were away from their desks sitting on a toilet).
After watching a demo, in a fit of technology hubris (remember those days?), I said, “We can do that with nothing but a browser and a refresh.” And we did.
It was a lesson we all had to learn the hard way: Take what you have and use it to the max before you go building the next thing.
Which is to say that there are ways to use the blogging tools (and video, audio, photo, and data tools) we already have that we cannot imagine yet.
