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Scripting News -- It's Even Worse Than It Appears.

About the author

A picture named daveTiny.jpgDave Winer, 56, is a software developer 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 and NYU, 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

scriptingnews2mail at gmail dot com.

Twitter

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Recent stories

Recent links

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

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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.

podcast.worldoutline.org Permalink.

I'm doing what's turning into a series of podcasts with Adam Curry.

Now we have a feed that you can subscribe to.

http://podcast.worldoutline.org/

You can put an rss.xml at the end of that but you don't need to.

It always returns the feed.

What kind of blogging do we want? Permalink.

Yesterday we got a look at a new software service called Branch, and a discussion between several people who used to work for Blogger, and Anil Dash (who, as far as I know, never did).

Daniel Bachhuber, a friend who works at WordPress, ooohed and ahhhed. I asked him why he liked it so much and he said a couple of things.

The discussion was focused on this topic: How do blogs need to evolve?

I wasn't asked to be part of the discussion, but since this is the open web, and they made their discussion public, I can say what I have to say. It's up to them if they want to include it in their discussion.

I've even provided the "source code" for this post -- just the text with a little bit of structure, and some attributes, with an open architecture for more attributes. So they can do more than link to it. They can "include" it.

The advantage of doing it this way is:

1. I maintain the original.

2. It can be included in as many places as it's relevant.

3. If I want to update it, I can, and it would update in all the places it is viewable.

4. Because I can update it, that means relative writing will be kept to a minimum. People can say what they think without making an issue of who's right and who's wrong. Because they might not stay right or wrong for very long! :-)

In the thread Evan Williams says that Twitter has a big advantage because it already has all the integration tools people want. It's understandable he would think that, I suppose, having participated in creating Twitter, but I don't agree. Here's why.

1. When I quoted Daniel in the second paragraph, you wouldn't believe the dance I had to do to get a link to the tweet onto the clipboard so I could link to it from my post. Even though I've done it dozens of times, I still made three mistakes for every action that worked.

2. Twitter has a 140-character limit, which means that for any kind of complex thought, beyond a grunt or snark (which is likely to be misunderstood because there wasn't room to explain it) I'm going to have to include a link, which of course must be shortened.

3. As they point out in the thread, Twitter is a company town. The archive belongs to them, to do with as they please. I have no say in the future uses of my own writing.

4. Finally, the strongest point -- even Twitter agrees it's not self-contained, because they support oEmbed, which allows them to include content that's hosted on other servers. However, they aren't even open about being open. You can only participate if you're a "partner." I don't know who pays who for this, or if anyone pays, but they admit that being open to content hosted elsewhere is necessary, but it isn't available to the people. In other words, we've given up all the beauty of the Internet, for what exactly? What did we get in return?

Anyway, even if I was invited to participate, all I would do is post a pointer to this blog post. Because here I own the editorial tools and can make them work any way I want to. There is no 140-character limit. There's no problem getting a permalink. I own the archive. Sure if you want to participate it's a bit of work, you have to set up a blog somewhere. That's okay with me. For a little bit of work you get a whole lot of freedom. That's a good deal.



© Copyright 1997-2012 Dave Winer. Last build: 3/5/2012; 1:48:21 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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