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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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scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

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Jan   Mar

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.

Rebooting the News today at noon Permalink.

Here's the MP3. Permalink.

Inside Job wins Best Documentary Permalink.

I watched the Oscars last night, of course. A dull show, compared to years-past, made completely evident by a tribute to Bob Hope and a brief appearance by Billy Crystal. I like Anne Hathaway, and James Franco is okay. But they sucked as Oscar masters of ceremony. I'll take Alec Baldwin or Steve Martin, Whoopie and Robin. This will be the long-forgotten Oscars. And it was a fairly forgettable year at the movies, as well. Imho of course.

A picture named ij.gifI was glad to see The King's Speech win so many awards. And was equally pleased to see The Social Network not win. The former was a surprisingly good story, and while they say it wasn't historically accurate -- the same can be said of Social Network. Seems relatively harmless to get the story of a long-dead royal wrong. But not so harmless to tell the wrong story of how software is developed, and what it's like to be a developer. That's the world we live in now, and the software stars are the new royalty. But we're not rock stars. Software is hard work, requires enormous dedication, focus and intellect and a drive to win. None of that came through in the movie about Facebook. They focused on Zuck's geekish weirdness with girlfriends and conference rooms full of lawyers and university administrators. BFD. Since when do lawyers matter? Seriously! :-)

But the Oscars got one thing right -- if you haven't seen Inside Job, you must -- now.

You don't understand anything about the world you live in until you understand that the bankers are every bit as depraved as they appear to be. The media has not told the story about their bosses. Not a big surprise there, I guess. There was a moment when our political leaders were outraged, and spoke up. It's there in the movie. But we've gone back to sleep. We'll wake up again, that's for sure, and it'll be worse next time through the loop.

You can buy Inside Job on Amazon today, for delivery next week. Go get it now. It's a wonderful movie. With it we get back to a tradition of telling ourselves the truth. We need a lot of that to dig out of the mess we're in.



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:33:53 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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