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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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May   Jul

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.

I love The Wire, but what's up with David Simon? Permalink.

I love The Wire. It's my favorite TV show of all time.

But I shake my head when I listen to interviews with the creator of the show, David Simon. How could someone so closed-minded, uninformed, and condescending -- and by the way wrong -- create something as wonderful as The Wire. I don't get it.

A picture named thewire.jpgThink about Season 5 (spoiler alert), where a newspaper reporter and cop conspire to fabricate a story that turns a city upside-down looking for a mass murderer who doesn't exist. The management of the paper lays off the best editorial people while trying to manufacture a Pulitzer Prize for itself. How could a person who sees the crap in news be so nostalgic it as it goes away. It's like wishing the East River could be polluted again, now that it's almost fully cleaned up. (Not a perfect analogy of course.)

And by the way, I read the interview with him on The Guardian website. I got the link from an RSS feed, but I could have just as easily gotten it from Twitter.

Twitter is often used to publish links to stories, not the stories themselves. His critique is based a misunderstanding of how Twitter works.

That's why a little curiosity to go with his bombast would point him in a positive direction. He could do some good with his mind and creativity and fame.

DaveCast? What?? Permalink.

In a conference call yesterday I said I'd do a podcast more regularly. Permalink.

So here's the first installment of what I'm calling DaveCast for lack of a more imaginative name.

BTW, my revelation for the day is Negative Time To Live, which is part of the DNS protocol. Until yesterday I didn't know it existed. I assumed that every time I do a DNS lookup I get a fresh bit of data from the authority on the name. I didn't know that servers could cache the negative result.

But, I don't think negative results should be cached. Why would I be repeatedly asking for the definition of a name that you just told me was undefined? I must have some idea that it should be defined.

Maybe I defined it. :-)

Amazon, in Route 53 provides a way to query the status of a request to create a new record. Usually it takes 5-7 seconds for a DNS request to go from pending status to insynch status. So I made the Blorkmark request be synchronous. It doesn't return until Amazon says it's defined. Then I do a DNS lookup. It works, and we're ready to roll.

Seems DNS itself should be able to handle it. Amazon doesn't really know if the domain will resolve, it just thinks it will. DNS is authoritative.



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:30:09 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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