hasn’t stopped Salon from selling subscriptions to services it probably won’t be around long enough to provide. The latest is a blog hosting service, provided in concert with the charming Dave Winer, a guy who’s been blogging almost as long as I have. The first Salon blog is Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment, by the Salon managing editor, who writes:
Blogs have become an Internet trend story — probably because there are so few other Internet trends right now, and most of those are too depressing to dwell on. Trend stories work best when reporters can drum up some conflict. Thus we have the War between the Bloggers and the Journalists.
Rosenberg understands trends. He engineered Salon’s acquisition of The Well, an on-line cult founded and shaped by refugees of Stephen Gaskin’s The Farm cult in Tennessee. Rosenberg has been a member of The Well since 1990, according to Katie Hafner’s account of the bizarre shenanigans that have taken place among the Wellberts for lo these many years.
Like Gaskin, Winer is a powerful and polarizing figure, and Rosenberg loves to bask in the glow of such people. Unlike Gaskin, the Well’s spiritual founder, Winer doesn’t seem to have too many nefarious plans, bastard children, kidnapped children, or suicidal corpses lying around him, so the worst aspect of the Winer/Wellbert partnership is what happens to subscribers when Salon finally goes out of business, which many suspect will happen in a few weeks. Presumably they can continue blogging on Winer’s iron, but Salon hasn’t clarified this to their potential customers.
Incidentally, I tried The Well for a few weeks, but they banned me for being a cult-buster, and banned my wife, a long-term member, for being married to me. Strange group, the Wellberts. Some of them are blogging now, but they don’t get much traffic, fortunately.
Double incidentally, I recommend Katie Hafner’s book The Well to anyone interested in the dynamics and power-relationships characteristic of cults.
Hard to know if you’re kidding or not about the cult thing, although people in that part of the Republic tend to the doctrinaire. The Well these days is really more like a WPA mural spraybombed over with so much trivial tribal grafitti tagging that it isn’t even worth the effort of slogging through it for material of general, or even public local, interest any longer.
The cult connections are real clear from Hafner’s book – McClure, fig, tex, and a couple of the others who shaped the Wellbert culture in the early days were ex-The Farm members, and The Farm was as much as cult as Jonestown. Kidnapping the children of people who tried to leave was on their list of accomplishments, and that’s exactly what Scientology did to Dennis Erlich when he left and opened their secret books to the public.