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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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My 40 most-recent links, ranked by number of clicks.

My bike

People are always asking about my bike.

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Here's a picture.

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Apr   Jun

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.

Flickr becomes important again, imho Permalink.

A picture named bird.jpgSounds like it's totally confirmed that Twitter will announce that they do photos, this week, at the D9 conference in California.

Meanwhile Flickr is still the way I upload pictures. I like that it's owned by Yahoo, a sleeping giant, living large and dangerous.

A lot of good people, people with years worth of photos on Flickr, will wonder what happens now.

Twitter going into photos will give us pause to think.

Me, I know what I'm doing -- I'm going to make a new home for my photos on the net, not inside a corporate blogging silo.

I'm totally okay with keeping the photos at Flickr. And continuing to keep them there. But I want them somewhere else too. Just in case. :-)

Biking round the tip of Manhattan Permalink.

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8.57 miles, 1 hour 9 minutes.

Hot day, best for biking.

The importance of perspective Permalink.

A quick story...

I had a major liquidity event that had to be covered by tech analysts, even people who didn't like me. And when they wrote their pieces, they generally said that they didn't, in one way or another -- and one even said why.

He said I turned on him.

I was puzzled because I don't remember doing that.

A picture named missile.gifWhat does that even mean, and do people ever actually turn on others?

Or is it just the way it seemed to him? That was the ephiphany I had a few days ago. To him, that must be what it looked like. Because he was doing the same things he was always doing, nothing changed with him. But one day, after me writing a bunch of glowing stuff about his work, I wrote something negative. That must have been what he saw as the "turn." And it makes perfect sense from his point of view.

From my point of view, something completely different happened.

I had been under the impression that his conference was run a certain way. That people speaking were chosen for merit, that they didn't pay for the right to speak. I learned that this wasn't true. The keynote speakers had all paid for their slots. And when they spoke they delivered ads, targeted directly at the people in the room. There were even calls-to-action -- Act Now -- this offer expires, etc etc. It was so completely obvious, and was not even slightly disclosed. Maybe the guy putting on the conference thought it was so obvious that he didn't need to disclose. The disappointment I felt was felt by others who were quite vocal in the hallway conversation.

So I wrote a piece basically saying I didn't like the conference. Big deal. I know it wouldn't matter much. People would still go, and over the years the conference grew and grew, and as far as I know they continue to do the same thing. I don't go to the conference because I don't like my time being used that way. I don't like watching commercial TV, but I put up with it, because at least it's honest. This was both a waste of time and dishonest.

The point of this piece though is that to each of us, the event was totally different. I just figured out how.



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:30:56 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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