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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.

Calendar

September 2011
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Aug   Oct

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.

Quick review of Contagion Permalink.

When I saw the previews of Contagion I knew I had to see it.

Pretty good, not great.

One comment -- yet another movie where the blogger is a sleazy hypocrite.

The only real villain in the movie -- the blogger.

Even the Homeland Security spook and his hedge fund buddy have more integrity.

Ugh.

Only steal from the best Permalink.

I don't know who said this first, but he or she was one smart mofo.

It's one of my mottos, along with Still diggin, Let's have fun, It's even worse than it appears (also a favorite). We make shitty software and We make shitty software, with bugs.

What's great about this slogan is that it has several meanings which sneak up on you as you ponder its meaning.

Here are some of the things you can glean from it:

1. I care who I steal from.

2. To me, stealing is a sign of respect.

3. I am selective about who I steal from.

4. I give credit to them.

A picture named girlclown.jpgAlso, you can almost infer that I wish to be stolen from, on these terms. (I do.)

And I think it's implicit, almost definitional, that you steal from people you respect. Because respect means listening, and stealing indicates you were listening.

When it comes to ideas implemented in software, I choose to see it like music. It's okay for the Rolling Stones to build their repetoire based on traditions pioneered by blues musicians. So it's okay for people working on realtime systems to use what we did with RSS. Or people working on authoring tools, or methods of knowledge representation and presentation, or narrating your work -- to use outliners.

I do my work not just to create products, but to advance the art.

Krugman on being an insider Permalink.

Krugman was given access to the text of the President's speech under embargo. He was at a conference where reporters were sure they knew what the President was going to announce. They were wrong, and Krugman knew it. He felt the satisfaction that comes from being an insider.

I know the feeling. I have been an insider myself.

But then he observes that there is no advantage to being an insider. The same insights are available to everyone, no matter who they are, as soon as the news is made public.

The same thing is true, of course, in tech. I need to know if the product works, not which competitors the product manager dreams of killing. That's why the rare review that actually incorporates a few weeks worth of use of a product is so much more valuable than a scoop.

Fact is most scoops are just sneak looks at press releases not products. I'm more interested in long, detailed, arms-length looks at products.

PS: Perfect example of an insider, dropping names, talking nonsense.



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:27:14 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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