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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.

"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.

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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.

The Internet is for revolution Permalink.

Does Facebook want their service to be used by Egyptians to overthrow their government? Probably not. They're trying to get China to let them in.

Chinese Internet censors don't want the people to hear about Egypt.

Zuckerberg went to China, very visibly. Google has been there, and withdrawn, and now would probably like to go back.

What does Facebook tell China when they ask if Facebook can be used to overthrow governments?

A picture named lib.gifWhen people think of the revolution in Egypt happening on Facebook and Twitter, what they really need to know is that these two corporate-owned websites are part of the Internet. It is that part that is useful to revolutionaries. The corporate side of their existence is an opposing force, because the tug of governments and profits makes them want their services to not be used for revolution.

This will become more obvious over time. It's why we must develop systems that are equal to Twitter and Facebook, but that aren't so easy to block.

We must make it so that a country, if it wants to turn off Internet-enabled revolution, must turn off the Internet itself.

BTW, this is something the VC community can agree with, imho. The evolution of social media to the edges will just create opportunities for new products, new startups, more money. As Bruce Sterling says, we're always centralizing then decentralizing then centralizing. It's the pulse of tech.

# 2/6/2011; 3:24:08 PM.   .


© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:34:36 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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