Home >  Archive >  2010 >  March >  28

Previous / Next

Christmas Tree
This site contributes to the scripting.com community river.
About the author

A picture named daveTiny.jpgDave Winer, 56, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and editor of the Scripting News weblog. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

"Dave was in a hurry. He had big ideas." -- Harvard.

"Dave Winer is one of the most important figures in the evolution of online media." -- Nieman Journalism Lab.

10 inventors of Internet technologies you may not have heard of. -- Royal Pingdom.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

8/2/11: Who I Am.

Contact me

scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Facebook

Twitter

Friendfeed

My sites
Recent stories

Recent links

My 40 most-recent links, ranked by number of clicks.

My bike

People are always asking about my bike.

A picture named bikesmall.jpg

Here's a picture.

Calendar

March 2010
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
 

Feb   Apr

Warning!

A picture named warning.gif

FYI: You're soaking in it. :-)


A picture named xmlMini.gif
Dave Winer's weblog, started in April 1997, bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Learn from quarterbacks Permalink.

A picture named touchdown.gifA picture named touchdownMirror.gifNick Bergus transcribed a bit from Rebooting the News #44.

I said this to Jay about the execs in the news industry.

"It's like in football. When the quarterback gets the ball, the quarterback always turns back and runs a few yards back before even thinking about passing the ball. And you think, 'Why is the quarterback doing that? He's giving up yardage. I mean, he's running the wrong way.' Well he does it to find some little bit of room so he can see what's out there. So, in the news industry, they're never willing to do that. They're always standing right at the scrimmage line, not budging an inch. And of course what happens -- they get tackled every goddamn time and they can never throw the ball."

Yup.

Just sittin by the river... Permalink.

A picture named joker.gifFred Wilson says you should vigorously defend your reputation on the Internet.

This is something I gave up on long ago.

There are too many people with too many axes to grind.

When competitors make public and personal accusations, how are you going to respond, when customers are watching? It's a very low-road way to compete. Not much you can but weather the storm, keep offering the best service you can, figuring the smart customers will ignore the personal stuff.

Anyway, there's an ancient Chinese proverb that goes something like this.

If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.

It works! As your competitors rise, eventually they have done to them what they did to you, and if you sit there a while, you don't have to do a thing -- nature takes care of it.

BTW, for some reason I love metaphors that involve watching the river. <img src=">

I have a river a few blocks from my house, with lots of benches, but this far south it isn't really a river, it's more of a bay.

Was Scripting News really born on April 1? Permalink.

A picture named joker.gifRudolf Ammann went to the trouble to figure out that April 1, 1997 is not actually the day a blog first appeared on the home page of scripting.com.

As he says, the real beginning of Scripting News is on February 19 of that year. And if you want to really have fun with it, Scripting News began a year before that with Frontier News (which I restarted earlier this year, 2010).

If you really want to mess with your mind, you'd have to go back to October 7, 1994 -- the day I started writing on the net -- when DaveNet started because that's also the beginning of Scripting News. The archive of that site was reverse chronologic, and in every way that matters, was a blog. When Scripting News got started, DaveNet were the long form pieces, otherwise my idea of a blog was a collection of short snips with a link, very much like what we do on Twitter today. DaveNet was more like what we think of as a blog.

I choose April 1 as the beginning of Scripting News because that's the day the archive begins.

Anyway...

13 years! That's a lot of bloggin. <img src=">



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:45:54 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

RSS feed for Scripting News


Previous / Next