I enjoyed writing the tongue-in-cheek news parodies announcing that Dave Winer, the Original Blogger, and inventor of the key technologies that make the BlogoSphere possible is shuffling off to the offline afterlife....

I enjoyed writing about the A-list bloggers scrambling for the abandoned Winer eyeballs. And because bloggers tend to do things herd-like, I speculated that Robert Scoble, Microsoft's top blogger might be next to go.

The trouble is that so very few people know anything about Dave Winer. He is probably the most influential blogger that no one knows. But he is universally revered among the A-list, he is easily the most influential voice in the blogosphere, and I think for many very good reasons.

But his stuff is difficult to understand at times--especially if you haven't spent much time in that rarefied ozone of the elite reaches of the BlogoSphere. I think he is one of a small number of original thinkers online and I think he'll continue to be influential online or offline.

You do not need to know about Dave Winer because you will get to know his ideas and influence as it is filtered down from the A-list and presented to you in a more digestible format. But if you did know Dave Winer, you might have enjoyed my news parodies and your cubicle neighbors might have wondered what you were laughing at, and you could have mystified them further by showing them my posts :-)

Other comments were:

He mentions wanting to matter less -- Does he matter at all?

I used to run into those folk all the time, and I could never tell who

was DOING anything, and who was just crowing a lot.

I can only repeat what my readers said to me: 'who's Dave Winer?'

Tom,
Your spoof on Dave Winer had me laughing out loud at my desk. Unfortunately, no one around me got the humor.

Dave Winer shock wave