Dave Winer

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Dave Winer
University of Wisconsin-Madison (MS
)
Known for
Dave Winer's voice
recorded October 2012

Dave Winer (born May 2, 1955, in

Userland Software and Small Picture Inc., a former contributing editor for the Web magazine HotWired, the author of the Scripting News[3] weblog, a former research fellow at Harvard Law School, and current visiting scholar at New York University
's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Early life and education

Winer was born on May 2, 1955, in

Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[7][8]

Career

Early work in outliners

In 1979 Dave Winer became an employee of

Personal Software, where he worked on his own product idea named VisiText, which was his first attempt to build a commercial product around an "expand and collapse" outline display[9] and which ultimately established outliners as a software product. In 1981 he left the company and founded Living Videotext to develop this still-unfinished product. The company was based in Mountain View, CA, and grew to more than 50 employees.[9]

ThinkTank, which was based on VisiText, was released in 1983 for

RAM resident outliner for the IBM PC released in 1985, was commercially successful but soon succumbed to the competing Sidekick product by Borland.[13] MORE, released for Apple's Macintosh in 1986, combined an outliner and a presentation program. It became "uncontested in the marketplace"[14] and won the MacUser's Editor's Choice Award for "Best Product" in 1986.[15]

In 1987, at the height of the company's success, Winer sold

Symantec[16] for an undisclosed but substantial transfer of stock[17] that "made his fortune."[18] Winer continued to work at Symantec's Living Videotext division, but after six months he left the company in pursuit of other challenges.[9]

Years at UserLand

Main article: UserLand Software

Winer founded UserLand Software in 1988[14] and served as the company's CEO until 2002.

UserLand's original flagship product,

Frontier, was a system-level scripting environment for the Mac
. Winer's pioneering weblog, Scripting News, takes its name from this early interest. Frontier was an outliner-based scripting language, echoing Winer's longstanding interest in outliners and anticipating code-folding editors of the late 1990s. Winer became interested in web publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers' online newspaper during San Francisco's
Frontier's NewsPage Suite of 1997, which supported the publication of Winer's Scripting News and was adopted by a handful of users who "began playing around with their own sites in the Scripting News vein."[19]: 59  These users included notably Chris Gulker and Jorn Barger, who envisaged blogging as a networked practice among users of the software.[21]

Winer was named a Seybold Fellow in 1997, to assist the executives and editors that comprised the Seybold Institute in ensuring "the highest quality and topicality" in their educational program, the

SOAP, which he co-authored with Microsoft's Don Box
, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein.

In December 1997, acting on the desire to "offer much more timely information,"[24] Winer designed and implemented an XML syndication format for use on his Scripting News weblog,[25][26] thus making an early contribution to the history of web syndication technology. By December 2000, competing dialects of RSS included several varieties of Netscape's RSS, Winer's RSS 0.92, and an RDF-based RSS 1.0. Winer continued to develop the branch of the RSS fork originating from RSS 0.92, releasing in 2002 a version called RSS 2.0.[27] Winer's advocacy of web syndication in general and RSS 2.0 in particular convinced many news organizations to syndicate their news content in that format.[28] For example, in early 2002 The New York Times entered an agreement with UserLand to syndicate many of their articles in RSS 2.0 format.[29] Winer resisted calls by technologists to have the shortcomings of RSS 2.0 improved. Instead, he froze the format and turned its ownership over to Harvard University.[30]

With products and services based on UserLand's

feed aggregators. UserLand was the first to add an "enclosure" tag in its RSS, modifying its blog software and its aggregator so that bloggers could easily link to an audio file (see podcasting and history of podcasting
).

In February 2002 Winer was named one of the "Top Ten Technology Innovators" by InfoWorld.[33]

In June 2002 Winer underwent life-saving bypass surgery[34] to prevent a heart attack and as a consequence stepped down as CEO of UserLand shortly after.[35] He remained the firm's majority shareholder, however, and claimed personal ownership of Weblogs.com.

Writer

As "one of the most prolific content generators in Web history,"[32] Winer has enjoyed a long career as a writer and has come to be counted among Silicon Valley's "most influential web voices."[36]

Winer started DaveNet,

Apple's management, and as a consequence of his strident criticism came to be seen as "the most notorious of the disgruntled Apple developers."[18] Redacted DaveNet columns were published weekly by the web magazine HotWired between June 1995 and May 1996.[32] DaveNet was discontinued in 2004.[citation needed
]

Winer's Scripting News,[3] described as "one of the [web's] oldest blogs,"[47] launched in February 1997[19]: 59 [48] and earned him titles such as "protoblogger"[49] and "forefather of blogging."[50] Scripting News started as "a home for links, offhand observations, and ephemera"[19]: 59  and allowed Winer to mix "his roles as a widely read pundit and an ambitious entrepreneur."[19]: 50  Offering an "as-it-happened portrait of the work of writing software for the Web in the 1990s,"[19]: 59  the site became an "established must-read for industry insiders."[32] Scripting News continues to be updated regularly.

Visiting scholar positions

Winer spent one year as a resident fellow at the

Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where he worked on using weblogs in education.[51] While there, he launched Weblogs at Harvard Law School[52] using UserLand software,[53] and held the first BloggerCon conferences.[54]
Winer's fellowship ended in June 2004.

In 2010 Winer was appointed visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.[55]

Return to Outliners

On December 19, 2012,[56] Winer co-founded Small Picture, Inc. with Kyle Shank;[57] Small Picture is a corporation that builds two outlining products, Little Outliner and Fargo. Little Outliner,[58] an entry-level outliner designed to teach new users about outliners,[59] which launched on March 25, 2013.[60] Fargo,[61] the company's "primary product",[56] launched less than a month later, on April 17, 2013. Fargo is a free browser-based outliner which syncs with a user's Dropbox account.[62] Small Picture has stated that in future it may offer paid-for services to Fargo users.[63] Fargo was retired at the end of September 2017.[64]

Projects and activities

24 Hours of Democracy

In February 1996, while working as a columnist for

civil liberty and freedom of speech.[65][66]

Edit This Page

In December 1999, Winer became the "proprietor of a growing free blog service"[19]: 67  at EditThisPage.com,[67][68] hosting "approximately 20,000 sites"[69] in February 2001. The service closed in December 2005.[70]

Podcasting

Main article: History of podcasting

Winer has been given "credit for the invention of the podcasting model."[71] Having received user requests for audioblogging features since October 2000, especially from Adam Curry,[72][73] Winer decided to include new functionality in RSS 0.92[74] by defining a new element[75] called "enclosure,"[76][77][78] which would pass the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator. He demonstrated the RSS enclosure feature on January 11, 2001, by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News weblog.[79]

Winer's weblogging product,

Radio Userland, the program favored by Curry, had a built-in aggregator and thus provided both the "send" and "receive" components of what was then called audioblogging.[80][81] In July 2003 Winer challenged other aggregator developers to provide support for enclosures.[82] In October 2003, Kevin Marks demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures and pass them to iTunes for transfer to an iPod.[83] Curry then offered an RSS-to-iPod script[84] that moved MP3 files from Radio UserLand to iTunes. The term "podcasting" was suggested by Ben Hammersley in February 2004.[85]

Winer also has an occasional podcast, Morning Coffee Notes,[86] which has featured guests such as Doc Searls, Mike Kowalchik, Jason Calacanis, Steve Gillmor, Peter Rojas, Cecile Andrews, Adam Curry, Betsy Devine and others.[87]

BloggerCon

Main article: BloggerCon

BloggerCon is a user-focused conference for the blogger community. BloggerCon I (October 2003) and II (April 2004), were organized by Dave Winer and friends at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society in Cambridge, Mass. BloggerCon III met at Stanford Law School on November 6, 2004.[88]

Weblogs.com

Main article: Weblogs.com

Weblogs.com provided a free

ping-server from Winer and promised that its free services would remain free. The podcasting-related web site audio.weblogs.com was also included in the $2.3 million deal.[93]

Share your OPML

Winer opened his self-described "commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy" in May 2006.

aggregator subscriptions using OPML.[95] Winer suspended its service in January 2008.[96]

Rebooting the News

Since 2009, Winer has collaborated with New York University's associate professor of journalism Jay Rosen on Rebooting the News, a weekly podcast on technology and innovation in journalism.[97] It was announced on July 1, 2011, that the show would be on break, as NYU itself was, from June to September. However, no new episodes have been released since, making show #94 released on May 23, 2011, the last.[98]

References

  1. ^ "Dave Winer on The Open Web, Blogging, Podcasting and More". Internet History Podcast. Retrieved October 30, 2017.
  2. ^ Winer, Dave (June 20, 2010). "Getting back to New York". Scripting News. Retrieved June 30, 2010.[self-published source]
  3. ^ a b Winer, Dave. "Scripting News". Scripting.com.
  4. ISSN 0022-2429
    .
  5. ^ Winer, Dave (December 27, 1994). "Spindler Speaks!". DaveNet. Retrieved June 10, 2009.[self-published source]
  6. ^ a b Cone, Edward. "Almost Famous". Wired. Retrieved March 2, 2021.
  7. ^ Vashishtha, Yashica (December 14, 2018). "Dave Winer : American Software Developer & the Fore-father of Blogging". Your Tech Story. Retrieved November 10, 2023.
  8. ^ "Dave Winer: How can universities educate journo-programmers?". Nieman Lab. Retrieved November 10, 2023.
  9. ^ a b c Swaine, Michael (September 1, 1991). "Calling Apple's Bluff". Dr. Dobb's. Retrieved June 8, 2009.
  10. ^ Sandberg-Diment, Erik (May 17, 1983). "'First idea processor'". New York Times. Retrieved May 10, 2009.
  11. ^ Sandberg-Diment, Erik (April 1, 1986). "New Software for making note scribbling easier". New York Times. Retrieved June 4, 2009.
  12. ^ Bartimo, Jim (February 25, 1985). "Macintosh: Success and disappointment". InfoWorld. 7 (8): 32.
  13. ^ Winer, Dave (April 12, 1995). "Get up, and do it again". DaveNet. Archived from the original on July 7, 2012. Retrieved June 8, 2009.
  14. ^ a b Winer, Dave (1988). "Outliners & Programming". Userland. Archived from the original on May 12, 2008. Retrieved August 15, 2008.
  15. ^ "Eddy Awards 1986". MacUser. 1986. Archived from the original on February 14, 2001. Retrieved May 19, 2009.
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  30. ^ Festa, Paul (August 4, 2003). "Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs". CNET News.
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  33. ^ Udell, Jon (February 27, 2002). "Top ten technology innovators: Dave Winer". Infoworld. Archived from the original on November 4, 2004. Retrieved May 13, 2009.
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  36. ^ Jones, K. C. (July 31, 2008). "NowPublic Lists Silicon Valley's Most Influential Web Voices". Information Week. Archived from the original on August 9, 2008. Retrieved May 11, 2009.
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  44. ^ Michalski, Jerry (June 23, 1995). "What's a zine?". Release 1.0. Vol. 13, no. 6. pp. 1–24.
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  51. ^ Festa, Paul (August 16, 2004). "Tech Industry: Blogging comes to Harvard". cnet.com. Retrieved March 17, 2016. [Subtitle:] Blogging veteran Dave Winer on teaching the art of the blog to one of America's top universities, and how he thinks the new technology will reshape the future of journalism.
  52. ^ "Weblogs at Harvard Law School". Harvard University.
  53. ^ Lin, Sam J. (February 28, 2003). "'Blog' expert hopes to bring trend to Harvard". Harvard Crimson. Cambridge, Mass.
  54. ^ Kramer, Staci D (November 19, 2004). "Two Cities, Two Gatherings for Two Kinds of Content Creators". Online Journalism Review. Archived from the original on February 8, 2013. Retrieved October 26, 2016.
  55. ^ Rosen, Jay (January 14, 2010). "Dave Winer, Welcome to NYU". Rebooting the News. Archived from the original on December 20, 2010. Retrieved January 21, 2011.
  56. ^ a b "What is Fargo?". smallpicture.com. Archived from the original on April 19, 2013. Retrieved March 17, 2016.
  57. ^ Farber, Dan (March 25, 2013). "Dave Winer debuts 'classic' Little Outliner". cnet.com. Retrieved March 17, 2016.
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  75. ^ Winer, Dave, December 27, 2000 Scripting News: Heads-up, I'm working on new features for RSS that build on 0.91. Calling it 0.92...
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  80. ^ Curry, Adam, October 21, 2002 UserNum 1014: Cool to hear my own audio-blog... Archived March 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  81. ^ Gilchrist, Harold October 27, 2002 Audioblog/Mobileblogging News this morning I'm experimenting with producing an audioblogging show... Archived March 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
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  83. ^ Marks, Kevin (October 4, 2003). "Bloggercon live video". Epeus' epigone. Retrieved June 12, 2009.
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  86. ^ Winer, Dave. "An occasional podcast". Morning Coffee Notes. Archived from the original on July 7, 2009. Retrieved June 12, 2009.
  87. ^ Winer, Dave. "Dave Winer's Personal Website: Curriculum Vitae [author-supplied CV]". blogs.law.harvard.edu. Retrieved March 17, 2016. This site is linked to from my Harvard business card.[self-published source]
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  93. ^ Naraine, Ryan (October 6, 2005). "VeriSign Acquires Dave Winer's Weblogs.com". eWeek. Retrieved May 8, 2009.
  94. ^ Arrington, Michael (May 7, 2006). "Share Your OPML". TechCrunch. Retrieved June 8, 2009.
  95. ISBN 978-0-596-52822-5
    .
  96. ^ Winer, Dave (January 23, 2008). "Share.opml.org, retired". Scripting News. Retrieved June 8, 2009.
  97. ^ Windsor, Tim (April 20, 2009). "Rebooting The News: Dave Winer and Jay Rosen on saving journalism". " Nieman Journalism Lab. Retrieved January 22, 2011.
  98. ^ Rosen, Jay (July 1, 2011). "We're on summer break for a bit". " Rebooting the News. Retrieved December 1, 2012.

Further reading

External links

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