Dave Winer, inventor of the
syndication format known as RSS
and former-proprietor of Userland
software, shut down close to 3000 weblogs this week after releasing
a statement noting that the financial burden of hosting these free
weblogs was finally too much to bear.
Moments after the shutdown, the user outcry reverberated around the web
community (as well as Blogdex,
where at one point, the top 10 most blog-linked websites were under the
weblogs.com domain name) and the
response was overwhelmingly negative.