Scripting News: Look a little closer

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

Look a little closer

Some people are saying that Day 1 of Scripting News was nothing more than a collection of links to sites I had visited. I have a couple of responses to that.

1. That's what weblogs were in the early days, it's only later that the the title-link-description model became the norm. Wes Felter, an early blogger, laments that change, and says it has more to do with the software than the way people blog. I agree, in fact that's why sites like del.icio.us came along to reinvent what blogs were in the first place! ";->"

2. Look a little closer, the last link on the page is to a DaveNet piece, which was more like what you'd think of as a blog post today. For people who weren't around back then, DaveNet was a series of essays I started in 1994, they were shipped via email, published on the web, and often quoted in the press (thanks!). I humbly put the link at the bottom of the page in the beginning because I didn't want to seem egotistic, but later I got over it, and put it at the top, where it belonged. Eventually I stopped writing DaveNets because mail became clogged with spam, and I wanted to encourage people do use the web more. Nowadays, Scripting News is like DaveNet, so things have come pretty much full circle in the almost thirteen years since all this michegas started.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:39 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.

Mar May