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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.

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

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"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.

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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.

Follow-up re Twitter suggested users feature Permalink.

A picture named elephant.jpgAs I posted yesterday, Twitter's new suggested users feature continues to impress.

Gotta wonder what if they had done this to begin with, how much more useful Twitter would be today. All the michegas about celebs using Twitter missed the point as far as I was concerned. I used Twitter. I didn't want Twitter to become TV. I don't have any use for TV except, very rarely, as entertainment. I value Twitter most when it connects me to intelligent people who have something to say. Now, with the new feature, at last they're trying to help me do that.

A couple of things came up in the meantime:

1. I wondered if there is an API for this feature. I want to write some custom tools to explore its suggestions. Apparently one was promised on the developer mail list as the feature was initially rolling out. Looking forward to trying it, when it's available. I think mashups of this feature will be interesting.

2. Chris Baskind asked a very important question. "Twitter's new Follow recommendations are an improvement. But I'd like Twitter to publicly disclose whether any are sponsored." I admit that when I saw them recommending products and companies I wondered too. A few minutes after he asked, we got an answer from Josh Elman, at Twitter: "The suggestions are not sponsored. Our only advertising products are promoted trends and promoted tweets as labeled."

# 8/9/2010; 5:06:22 PM.   .


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