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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.

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People are always asking about my bike.

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May   Jul

Warning!

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


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Dave Winer's weblog, started in April 1997, bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Welcome to reallysimple.org Permalink.

They say all the good domain names are taken, but in my experience a lot of good ones are still available.

http://reallysimple.org/

I'm using the acquisition of this domain as an excuse to add a feature to Scripting2 that allows me to map a domain to a blog post, as a placeholder.

I like this domain because the term "really simple" is starting to show up in marketing slogans. It caught on. All because RSS needed a name that made sense to human beings way back in 2001.

They also say the shorter the name the better. But names get conceptually shortened as they get more familiar. Every year since 2001, as the name "Really Simple Syndication" was repeated, the idea of "really simple" became easier to say and recognize as something good. So while the name has a lot of letters, that's only in a technical sense. The two words in it are very short, as concepts.

BTW, there's a bug in my domain mapping software that I will fix shortly. I have to go to a meeting right now. So for a little bit the placeholder site (this page) is not mapping correctly. Still diggin!

Dear Canon: Time to add communications to your low-end cameras Permalink.

A picture named crosshairs.gifThere's a long list of products that are getting annexed by the market defined by iPhone and Android. The most recent to succumb are e-book reader hardware and GPS devices.

Someday the iPhone will be seen for what it is and is not. It is not a phone. It is a Swiss Army Knife of ultra portable computing. Sure the phone on the iPhone doesn't work, but who uses the phone these days? But don't worry voice will be new again, seen as an innovation. Look forward to the day when you'll text someone: I'm at a Starbucks, let's switch to voice. <img src=">

Amazon being smart, is quickly turning Kindle into a software product. No strategy taxes for the books. If people prefer to read on an iPad or a Droid, not a problem for Amazon -- they make software for all platforms. Even netbooks running Windows and Mac desktops. The Apple version of Kindle does video, even though Amazon's hardware doesn't. How's that for being open-minded and aggressive!

Now it's getting pretty close to too late for the low-end camera-makers to add basic communications to their products, and design the UI around that, instead of the klunky methods they now have for getting the pictures off the devices. It should be simple. As I review pictures on the camera, I will click a button that says that I want the photo to be transmitted to a place I configured through a website from my desktop, laptop, iPad -- whatever. Then, in the background, quickly -- it uploads the pictures, with nothing further needed from the user.

Apple and Google still do not have this functionality.

Imagine how a camera with the Twitter or Facebook logo would work. You wouldn't even need to configure it beyond telling it your Facebook username and password. If Canon isn't working on this now they'll be out of the low-end camera business in less than five years. That's how quickly the Apple/Google juggernaut is moving.

It's time for one of the products that are in Apple's cross-hairs to do the necessary innovation before Apple does. Don't be a sitting duck and then a deer caught in the headlights, making stupid jokes about how you can hold your product any way you want. No one thinks its funny, it's so sad. It's already too late when it comes to that.

PS: People will say, as they always do, that I should check out EyeFi, but I have -- of course. Not what I'm thinking of.

PPS: Version 2.0 of the communicating camera product will be the social camera.



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:42:31 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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