What's New Now
Thursday, April 09, 2009 by Dave Winer.
In yesterday's piece about the AP fighting last century's battle, the big story is not that AP has missed the Internet opportunity of the 21st century, it's that everyone has. 
No one, and I mean no one, has the site that everyone goes to to find out What's New Now.
The holy grail is the What's New Now page for everyone.
The place we go to find out what's happening in the world.
Someone will crack that nut and make the NYT, CNN, Google, Facebook and Twitter look like stepping-stones.
My point yesterday was that, in theory, it could be AP. Too small a point.
Adrian Palacios asks if there will really be a single source. "Yes I think at least for a while there will be one What's New Now site that we will "all" use -- in the same sense that everyone got their news in the early 90s from CNN. Of course there were exceptions, but it had the aura of being the place to tune in when something is happening. Nightline played that role in the early 80s. There is nothing now that does that, there's a void. But people still want news. And the Internet has great potential for news that it hasn't lived up to yet. Probably because people who love news and know it best have been scared or shouted down or some combination of both. I think the shouting is about to stop and I think a consensus will emerge. I think AP and CNN and Twitter will all kick themselves for not having focused on this."
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"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.
Dave Winer, 53, 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 Berkeley, California.
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