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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.

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Calendar

April 2011
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Mar   May

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.

Public dropbox without the lock-in Permalink.

First a few necessary recitals:

1. Dropbox is very useful.

2. I pay $99 a year for the upgrade.

3. I use the Public folder to host all kinds of stuff. It neatly solves a problem that's been around forever -- how to quickly and easily put up small files that provide connective glue for the net. I use it for reading lists, my elements of the world outline, default configuration files for software I maintain.

Now there's a problem with using the public folder this way. Lock-in. Consider that this is the URL of a file in my public folder.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1006496/worldOutline/defaultRootOutline.opml

A picture named paddles.jpgWhat if Dropbox were to go away, or change the terms of use to prevent me from doing this. I'd be S.O.L. because I'd spread these URLs all over the place. I can't redirect them because I don't own dl.dropbox.com.

I've been worried about this, so yesterday I set up an Amazon S3 bucket to host a mirror of my public dropbox. So I can use this new URL:

http://dropbox.scripting.com/dave/worldOutline/defaultRootOutline.opml

Now I can move it anywhere I want, whenever I want, yet still have the convenience of Dropbox.

Win-win! :-)

PS: How do I do it? It's a feature of the OPML Editor. Click this link with it running on your machine. Screen shot.

# 4/25/2011; 7:40:05 AM.   .


© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:32:04 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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