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Phil Jones on how things connect

Wednesday, September 09, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Phil Jones and I agree on how bootstraps work. 

He wrote a beautiful piece in 2006, and just re-ran it with links to 2009 bits that illustrate his points.  

It's a case study in how Internet bootstraps work. They're about 10 percent technology and 90 percent working with people, trying to figure out what they want and getting it for them. In the process something builds out that has a cohesive whole, and another layer is formed.  

A few years go by and we do it again. 

I'm certainly not the only person who understands this process, I'm a student, and I've learned from many others that come before. I love reading books about how this works, and the latest inspiration was the Connections series by James Burke. He goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization and shows how ideas interconnect and build on other ideas.  

In the end it really is all about working together. And I'm glad that Phil is there. It's nice to have someone watching who sees how it all fits together.  

Then, this evening, a really insightful Webmonkey piece came out. It's the same insight that William Mougayar had, in a comment here yesterday. When this bootstrap plays out it will all be seen to have happened at the workstation. What Matt and Wordpress did over the weekend was the nuclear fuel that lit the fire. But the big winners will be the readers, skimmers and Twitter clients that will, as Webmonkey puts it so well: "We'll just have to stop calling them Twitter clients and start calling them what they should be referred to as: news clients." Amen.