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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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Calendar

January 2011
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Dec   Feb

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.

Silo-free everything Permalink.

Interesting piece on TechCrunch today about Instagram blocking a scraper that turns its data flow into RSS. Here's what I would do if I were Instagram and wanted to fend off competition from the open web on one side, and Twitter on the other.

1. Offer the user the option to store their pictures in an S3 bucket or an FTP site, or do a deal with Dropbox and have an option to store the pictures in the user's public Dropbox folder.

2. Also write an RSS feed to that folder that anyone can subscribe to if somehow they can find their way to it.

A picture named silo.gifThis is good for a couple of reasons.

1. It gets rid of some nasty potential competition.

2. It helps develop new systems for feed discovery.

3. It builds independence of Twitter, now, while they still have the market relatively to themselves. It will all change, dramatically, when Twitter introduces its own picture-sharing, integrated with their iPhone and iPad apps. The iPhone camera will appear to be part of Twitter.

One way or another, the time to bootstrap silo-free picture sharing is now.

PS: Refer to the schematic. Instagram is one of the etc's on the left side of the diagram.

PPS: I wrote this quickly before heading out for lunch uptown. Please read it with considerable slack-cutting. :-)

PPPS: The mistake my VC friends make is they think it's either/or. Either you support the open web and are a charity, or you build a silo, monetize it, and get rich. What really happens is that the silos are eventually undermined by the open web. This happens when the market is choked with startups with nothing to lose. Some of them are going to successfully differentiate by offering users freedom. We're coming up to the part of teh cycle where the users value it. The opportunities to lock-in will come again, but first this cycle has to complete.



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:35:16 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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