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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.

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People are always asking about my bike.

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Sep   Nov

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.

Relying on Facebook, Twitter and Google Permalink.

The NY Times has a report in today's paper about the Occupy Wall Street campaign and its spread to other cities around the country.

The second paragraph begins: "With little organization and a reliance on Facebook, Twitter and Google groups to share methods, the Occupy Wall Street campaign, as the prototype in New York is called..."

They put their finger on exactly what is troubling, from my perspective, about using corporate online media to organize political efforts to upset a supposedlly different corporate world. The assumption is that there are no connections between Wall Street and the ownership of the tech companies. This of course is not true. They are very interlocked. When Wall Street is threatened the response could easily come from one of the online networks.

Better to develop completely independent communication channels in case the Google, Facebook or Twitter ones are interrupted. Or as independent as you can possibly make it. Depending on university-hosted communication systems, for example, while certainly not foolproof, is a better bet than using the corporate systems.

Having multiple redundant channels is the best way of all. (In other words, based on the design of the Internet itself.)

Right now I don't want to be more specific because I don't want to jinx the great energy behind this movement. If I see specific signs that they are over-relying on corporate online media, I'll say more.

PS: I couldn't disagree more with this piece in the Atlantic. Just the act of occupying space in the middle of NYC is causing people to talk about things in a way they weren't before. It's the change they're creating in the rest of us that matters right now, not the ignorance of Wall St. They will be the last to hear it.

Stolen from the best Permalink.

One of my mottos is Only Steal from the Best.

It was with that in mind that I stole the design of my new story template from Readability. I figured they had invested so much in figuring out what readable meant in web writing, why not just lift the design and use it on my site?

I sent a pointer to Rich Ziade, the CEO of Arc90, the company that makes Readability, with my compliments. He said in response, "It doesn't need Readability. A good sign!" Now that's a software developer I admire. A man on a mission -- to make the web more readable.

And we're doing our small part here at Scripting News.

New design for scripting.com Permalink.

Yet another new look for scripting.com.

A picture named bullwinkle.gifIt uses the Bootstrap toolkit for some things, but I didn't use their grid layout or the fluid two-column layout. Couldn't make the grid work, and the two-column layout had the columns arranged backwards.

This is a test to see how subtext looks in the new setup.

Using Google Web Fonts for the title of the home page, and for the text on the home page. The title is Fondiner Swanky (which people think of as the Rocky and Bullwinkle font) and the text on the home page is the very nice Ubuntu font. On the story pages I use Georgia.

I really like the blue text for links. That's a Bootstrap thing.

Not sure what to do with the linkblog contents. It's kind of disruptive, not in a good way, but I want to give people access to the links I publish. Still thinking about that.

As has been pointed out in the comments, it's broken in Chrome. Probably elsewhere. Oy. (I need a nap.)



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:26:18 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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