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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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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.

New York earthquake Permalink.

Holy guacamole.

I thought there was heavy machinery rolling by.

As an longtime Californian I can't tell you how distressing it is to have an earthquake here.

Of course Twitter was all over it as soon as it happened.

Question #1 -- are all the nuclear power plants okay?

Google News query for New York earthquake.

And an earthquake in Colorado.

Indirect business models FTW Permalink.

Google started as a search engine without knowing how they'd make money, and found a business they could be in because of the product they made. The product itself doesn't generate revenue. But the bigger it is, the more money they make.

That was a gutsy move on the part of the investors. It led to a new way of building companies, but I don't think people are fully comfortable with it yet. Because they still try to drive companies into making money in predictable ways and aren't looking for the serendipitous ways to make money. I think very often it's the latter that is the gusher, where the former yields ordinary growth.

This is an idea I've been discussing over the years with Doc Searls, as well as with the readers of this blog.

A picture named bankLarrySergey.gifI say don't put ads on your blog, they just pull attention away from the ideas you're writing about.

And they limit the number of ideas that come back to you. Any one of which could make you a billion dollars.

You can pick up a few nickels and dimes with ads. But you might get rich from the ideas that come to you because you're putting your ideas out there. You don't want to think of blogs as if they were print pubs, they can do something print pubs never could do -- talk back to you.

Think of it this way, your ideas are raw material. Publish them and they become a product. And what comes back is also raw material. Which can become products.

In Doc parlance, you're not making money from your ideas -- you're making money because of them.

What made me think of this has been the long drawn out discussion over Twitter's business model. I've been thinking about it since 2007. Businesses that Twitter could be in because they have Twitter. But not seeing Twitter itself as a business.

I think they could have locked up the camera market by now. Maybe they're doing that with Apple. I hope Apple is paying them enough. :-)

The thing Twitter could do there that no one but Facebook can do, is what Google is doing with Google-Plus. Just take the picture and that's it. It's automatically up there shortly after taking it. From there you can push it anywhere. But by having a place, as Twitter has since 2006, and having lots of people coming to that place, it immediately becomes attractive to have buses, subways, roads that come into the place. Only in this case instead of cars and people, it's ideas, pictures, movies, location, etc.

I know I'm rambling.

One of the really amazing things about New York City is the extent to which the city anticipated its own growth. It built elevated rail systems to neighborhoods that didn't exist. A grid that went into the Bronx when the city barely made it to 14th St. A huge city park in the middle of nowhere. Tech guys have to think like that. So few do. Seriously.

People who do this think this way should win awards. It goes beyond design. It isn't a matter of how rich you are. It's how boldly you think, and then execute to that vision. And also how flexible you are, when you learn things about your framework that you didn't envision (so it goes beyond vision as well). And you not only let other people play, but build that in from the start.

1000-char limit on comments? Permalink.

I keep posting feature requests for Disqus here, or for anyone who might be developing a competitive product.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could set a maximum length for comments?

We seem to like a limit in Twitter (though I wish it were more than 140, personally).

A picture named lifesaver.gifWhy not have a sysop-settable limit.

I'd start with a 1000 character limit.

If you need more than 1000 characters, you should be writing a blog post, not a comment.

What do you think?

I think we need a more hackable comment system, btw, so if we get ideas for features we don't have to wait, possibly a very long time. How about an open source commenting system?



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:27:52 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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