Wired: Thousands of Blogs Fall Silent

He thought he was doing something nice when he began to offer free hosting for weblogs, but Userland co-founder Dave Winer found the burden too onerous when his former company made him take over the task himself. So last weekend, without giving any notice, he pulled the plug on thousands of blogs. Bloggers are at least temporarily unable to access any of their writings, and some are accusing Winer of Blogicide. For his part, Winer offered to provide copies of the content eventually to those who ask.

Winer is the major developer and continuing controller of the RSS system for website syndication. Some companies have gravitated to an alternate format in the past year because they feared Winer was not open to serious consideration of other people's opinions and that his behavior was somewhat erratic.