Dave Winer’s ability to peer into the future is uncanny. He was talking about a river of news long before the current activity streams became popular. He was evangelizing RSS long before there were blogs. I could go on and on about his prescient observations, but it’s his warnings that are especially prophetic.

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Jason Calacanis just put Twitter in business. How? He offered $250,000 to be one of 20 users in Twitter’s “Suggested Follows” for two years.

Twitter is growing so fast that being on the “suggested” list for new users can generate more than 10,000 followers a day. Jason thinks the slots will soon be worth a Super-Bowl-like $1 million a year, as companies compete to be able to send real-time messages directly to millions of followers.

Or not.

Dave Winer complains that the Suggested Follows list is unfair. Twitter investor Fred Wilson seems to agree:

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There are just a few hours left in what should be an international holiday–RSS Awareness Day. Thought up by the good folks at DailyBlogTips.com and unknown until this morning to even RSS forefather Dave Winer, RSS Awareness Day is a fantastic idea. May 1 is a lot of things already but what the heck, let’s pile another one on. We’d like to take a few minutes to reflect on the world-changing tool that RSS is, and consider how different our lives would be without it.

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In 2002, blogging evangelist Dave Winer made a long bet with New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz: “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.” Today, Associated Press editors and news directors chose the top 10 news stories of the year, which makes it possible to determine who won the bet.

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