Scripting News: InfoWorld, we hardly knew ye

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

InfoWorld, we hardly knew ye

I read Jim Forbes's memorial for InfoWorld with goose bumps. It turns out they finally pulled the plug on the magazine, which used to be known in the very early days (which I am old enough to remember) The Intelligent Machines Journal. I first heard about it at one of the early West Coast Computer Faires, the same one where I met Ted Nelson, Mitch Kapor and Dan Bricklin.

Lots of great reporters got their start at InfoWorld. I rolled out all my products of the 80s through it. I was friends with all the editors, including Stewart Alsop, Jim Fawcette and Jonathan Sacks. And Michael Miller, before he went to PC Mag, set the standard on software reviews. More great people I've worked with when they were at InfoWorld: John Dvorak, John Markoff, Paul Freiberger, Denise Caruso, Laurie Flynn, Adam Osborne, Deborah Branscum, Michael Swaine, Scott Mace, Maggie Canon, Rachel Parker, Brett Glass; and of course Jim Forbes.

They were the second publication to review ThinkTank, in 1983, and they put us over the top, with four perfect ratings. We raised two million dollars on the Doug and Denise Green review, in a very real sense, InfoWorld put me in business. That review also got Guy Kawasaki to call me, just before he took his first job at Apple. I remember his first words -- "They say your product walks on water." And that got me one of the first Macs, when it was still a secret, and as they say, the rest is history.

InfoWorld was the first tech publication that gave you sweaty palms when it arrived in the mail. This was before the web, so news came in weekly installments. When InfoWorld arrived, everything else stopped. I read it from cover to cover.

Truth be told, I thought they had stopped printing InfoWorld a long time ago. it's amazing it lasted so long. We grew up together, all the great people who worked there. But we're grown up now, the news happens much more quickly, and as I'm fond of saying, it's distributed now, but I'll never forget the great times we had, way back when.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:36 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. 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.

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.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Feb Apr