Dave Winer

Dave Winer (born May 2, 1955, in Queens, New York City)<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and writer who resides in New York City.<ref>Template:Cite webTemplate:Self-published source</ref>Template:Self-published inline Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services, as well as blogging and podcasting. He is the founder of the software companies Living Videotext, Userland Software and Small Picture Inc., a former contributing editor for the Web magazine HotWired, the author of the Scripting News<ref name="scriptingnews">Template:Cite web</ref> weblog, a former research fellow at Harvard Law School, and current visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Early life and education

Template:Third-party Winer was born on May 2, 1955, in Queens, New York City, the son of Eve Winer, PhD, a school psychologist, and Leon Winer, PhD, a former professor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Winer is also the grandnephew of German novelist Arno Schmidt and a relative of Hedy Lamarr.<ref>Template:Cite webTemplate:Self-published source</ref>Template:Self-published inline He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1972. Winer received a BA in Mathematics from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1976.<ref name="almost-famous" /> In 1978 he received an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Career

Early work in outliners

In 1979 Dave Winer became an employee of Personal Software, where he worked on his own product idea named VisiText, which was his first attempt to build a commercial product around an "expand and collapse" outline display<ref name="apple-bluff">Template:Cite news</ref> and which ultimately established outliners as a software product. In 1981 he left the company and founded Living Videotext to develop this still-unfinished product. The company was based in Mountain View, CA, and grew to more than 50 employees.<ref name=apple-bluff />

ThinkTank, which was based on VisiText, was released in 1983 for Apple II and was promoted as an "idea processor."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> It became the "first popular outline processor, the one that made the term generic."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> A ThinkTank release for the IBM PC followed in 1984, as well as releases for the Macintosh 128K and 512K.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Ready, a RAM resident outliner for the IBM PC released in 1985, was commercially successful but soon succumbed to the competing Sidekick product by Borland.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> MORE, released for Apple's Macintosh in 1986, combined an outliner and a presentation program. It became "uncontested in the marketplace"<ref name="outliners-and-programming">Template:Cite web</ref> and won the MacUser's Editor's Choice Award for "Best Product" in 1986.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1987, at the height of the company's success, Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> for an undisclosed but substantial transfer of stock<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> that "made his fortune."<ref name="borsook">Template:Cite journal</ref> Winer continued to work at Symantec's Living Videotext division, but after six months he left the company in pursuit of other challenges.<ref name=apple-bluff/>

Years at UserLand

Winer founded UserLand Software in 1988<ref name=outliners-and-programming /> and served as the company's CEO until 2002.

UserLand's original flagship product, Frontier, was a system-level scripting environment for the Mac. Winer's pioneering weblog, Scripting News, takes its name from this early interest. Frontier was an outliner-based scripting language, echoing Winer's longstanding interest in outliners and anticipating code-folding editors of the late 1990s. Winer became interested in web publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers' online newspaper during San Francisco's newspaper strike of November 1994,<ref name="rosenbergEverything">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Rp According to Newsweek, through this experience, he "revolutionized Net publishing."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Winer subsequently shifted the company's focus to online publishing products, enthusiastically promoting and experimenting with these products while building his websites and developing new features. One of these products was Frontier's NewsPage Suite of 1997, which supported the publication of Winer's Scripting News and was adopted by a handful of users who "began playing around with their own sites in the Scripting News vein."<ref name=rosenbergEverything/>Template:Rp These users included notably Chris Gulker and Jorn Barger, who envisaged blogging as a networked practice among users of the software.<ref>Template:Cite conference</ref>

Winer was named a Seybold Fellow in 1997, to assist the executives and editors that comprised the Seybold Institute in ensuring "the highest quality and topicality" in their educational program, the Seybold Seminars; the honor was bestowed for his "pioneering work in web-based publishing systems."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Keen to enter the "competitive arena of high-end Web development,"<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Winer then came to collaborate with Microsoft and jointly developed the XML-RPC protocol. This led to the creation of SOAP, which he co-authored with Microsoft's Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein.

In December 1997, acting on the desire to "offer much more timely information,"<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Winer designed and implemented an XML syndication format for use on his Scripting News weblog,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> thus making an early contribution to the history of web syndication technology. By December 2000, competing dialects of RSS included several varieties of Netscape's RSS, Winer's RSS 0.92, and an RDF-based RSS 1.0. Winer continued to develop the branch of the RSS fork originating from RSS 0.92, releasing in 2002 a version called RSS 2.0.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Winer's advocacy of web syndication in general and RSS 2.0 in particular convinced many news organizations to syndicate their news content in that format.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> For example, in early 2002 The New York Times entered an agreement with UserLand to syndicate many of their articles in RSS 2.0 format.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Winer resisted calls by technologists to have the shortcomings of RSS 2.0 improved. Instead, he froze the format and turned its ownership over to Harvard University.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

With products and services based on UserLand's Frontier system, Winer became a leader in blogging tools from 1999 onward,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> as well as a "leading evangelist of weblogs."<ref name="almost-famous" /> In 2000 Winer developed the Outline Processor Markup Language OPML, an XML format for outlines, which originally served as the native file format for Radio UserLand's outliner application and has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange lists of web feeds between web feed aggregators. UserLand was the first to add an "enclosure" tag in its RSS, modifying its blog software and its aggregator so that bloggers could easily link to an audio file (see podcasting and history of podcasting).

In February 2002 Winer was named one of the "Top Ten Technology Innovators" by InfoWorld.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In June 2002 Winer underwent life-saving bypass surgery<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> to prevent a heart attack and as a consequence stepped down as CEO of UserLand shortly after.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He remained the firm's majority shareholder, however, and claimed personal ownership of Weblogs.com.

Writer

As "one of the most prolific content generators in Web history,"<ref name="almost-famous">Template:Cite magazine</ref> Winer has enjoyed a long career as a writer and has come to be counted among Silicon Valley's "most influential web voices."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Winer started DaveNet,<ref name="davenet">Template:Cite web</ref> "a stream-of-consciousness newsletter distributed by e-mail"<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> in November 1994<ref name="lappin">Template:Cite magazine</ref> and maintained Web archives of the "goofy and informative"<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> 800-word essays since January 1995,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> which earned him a Cool Site of the Day award in March 1995.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> From the start, the "Internet newsletter"<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> DaveNet was widely read among industry leaders and analysts,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> who experienced it as a "real community."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Dissatisfied with the quality of the coverage that the Mac and, especially, his own Frontier software received in the trade press, Winer saw DaveNet as an opportunity to "bypass"<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> the conventional news channels of the software business. Satisfied with his success, he "reveled in the new direct email line he had established with his colleagues and peers, and in his ability to circumvent the media."<ref name=rosenbergEverything/>Template:Rp In the early years, Winer often used DaveNet to vent his grievances against Apple's management, and as a consequence of his strident criticism came to be seen as "the most notorious of the disgruntled Apple developers."<ref name="borsook" /> Redacted DaveNet columns were published weekly by the web magazine HotWired between June 1995 and May 1996.<ref name=almost-famous /> DaveNet was discontinued in 2004.Template:Citation needed

Winer's Scripting News,<ref name=scriptingnews /> described as "one of the [web's] oldest blogs,"<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> launched in February 1997<ref name=rosenbergEverything/>Template:Rp<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and earned him titles such as "protoblogger"<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and "forefather of blogging."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Scripting News started as "a home for links, offhand observations, and ephemera"<ref name=rosenbergEverything/>Template:Rp and allowed Winer to mix "his roles as a widely read pundit and an ambitious entrepreneur."<ref name=rosenbergEverything/>Template:Rp Offering an "as-it-happened portrait of the work of writing software for the Web in the 1990s,"<ref name=rosenbergEverything/>Template:Rp the site became an "established must-read for industry insiders."<ref name=almost-famous /> Scripting News continues to be updated regularly.

Visiting scholar positions

Winer spent one year as a resident fellow at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where he worked on using weblogs in education.<ref name="festa">Template:Cite journal</ref> While there, he launched Weblogs at Harvard Law School<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> using UserLand software,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and held the first BloggerCon conferences.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite news</ref> Winer's fellowship ended in June 2004.

In 2010 Winer was appointed visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Return to outliners

On December 19, 2012,<ref name="smallpicture.com">Template:Cite web</ref> Winer co-founded Small Picture, Inc. with Kyle Shank;<ref name="FarberCNET_25Mar13">Template:Cite journal</ref> Small Picture is a corporation that builds two outlining products, Little Outliner and Fargo. Little Outliner,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> an entry-level outliner designed to teach new users about outliners,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> which launched on March 25, 2013.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Fargo,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> the company's "primary product",<ref name="smallpicture.com" /> launched less than a month later, on April 17, 2013. Fargo is a free browser-based outliner which syncs with a user's Dropbox account.<ref name="Klosowski2013">Template:Cite web</ref> Small Picture has stated that in future it may offer paid-for services to Fargo users.<ref name="smallpicture.com" /> Fargo was retired at the end of September 2017.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Projects and activities

24 Hours of Democracy

In February 1996, while working as a columnist for HotWired, Winer organized 24 Hours of Democracy, an online protest against the recently passed Communications Decency Act. As part of the protest, over 1,000 people, among them Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, posted essays to the Web on the subject of democracy, civil liberty and freedom of speech.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Edit This Page

In December 1999, Winer became the "proprietor of a growing free blog service"<ref name=rosenbergEverything/>Template:Rp at EditThisPage.com,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> hosting "approximately 20,000 sites"<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> in February 2001. The service closed in December 2005.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Podcasting

Winer has been given "credit for the invention of the podcasting model."<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> Having received user requests for audioblogging features since October 2000, especially from Adam Curry,<ref name="itworld_podcasting">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Winer decided to include new functionality in RSS 0.92<ref>Winer, Dave, December 25, 2000 RSS 0.92 Specification Template:Webarchive</ref> by defining a new element<ref>Winer, Dave, December 27, 2000 Scripting News: Heads-up, I'm working on new features for RSS that build on 0.91. Calling it 0.92...</ref> called "enclosure,"<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> which would pass the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator. He demonstrated the RSS enclosure feature on January 11, 2001, by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News weblog.<ref>Winer, Dave, January 11, 2001 Scripting News: Tonight's song on the Grateful Dead audio weblog is Truckin...</ref>

Winer's weblogging product, Radio Userland, the program favored by Curry, had a built-in aggregator and thus provided both the "send" and "receive" components of what was then called audioblogging.<ref>Curry, Adam, October 21, 2002 UserNum 1014: Cool to hear my own audio-blog... Template:Webarchive</ref><ref>Gilchrist, Harold October 27, 2002 Audioblog/Mobileblogging News this morning I'm experimenting with producing an audioblogging show... Template:Webarchive</ref> In July 2003 Winer challenged other aggregator developers to provide support for enclosures.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In October 2003, Kevin Marks demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures and pass them to iTunes for transfer to an iPod.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Curry then offered an RSS-to-iPod script<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> that moved MP3 files from Radio UserLand to iTunes. The term "podcasting" was suggested by Ben Hammersley in February 2004.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Winer also has an occasional podcast, Morning Coffee Notes,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> which has featured guests such as Doc Searls, Mike Kowalchik, Jason Calacanis, Steve Gillmor, Peter Rojas, Cecile Andrews, Adam Curry, Betsy Devine and others.<ref name="nnaelr">Template:Cite webTemplate:Self-published source</ref>

BloggerCon

Template:Main BloggerCon is a user-focused conference for the blogger community. BloggerCon I (October 2003) and II (April 2004), were organized by Dave Winer and friends at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society in Cambridge, Mass. BloggerCon III met at Stanford Law School on November 6, 2004.<ref name=":0" />

Weblogs.com

Template:Main Weblogs.com provided a free ping-server used by many blogging applications, as well as free hosting to many bloggers. After leaving Userland, Winer claimed personal ownership of the site, and in mid-June 2004 he shut down its free blog-hosting service, citing lack of resources and personal problems.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> A swift and orderly migration off Winer's server was facilitated by Rogers Cadenhead,<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> whom Winer then hired to port the server to a more stable platform.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> In October 2005, VeriSign bought the Weblogs.com ping-server from Winer and promised that its free services would remain free. The podcasting-related web site audio.weblogs.com was also included in the $2.3 million deal.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Share your OPML

Winer opened his self-described "commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy" in May 2006.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The site allowed users to publish and syndicate blogrolls and aggregator subscriptions using OPML.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Winer suspended its service in January 2008.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Rebooting the News

Since 2009, Winer has collaborated with New York University's associate professor of journalism Jay Rosen on Rebooting the News, a weekly podcast on technology and innovation in journalism.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> It was announced on July 1, 2011, that the show would be on break, as NYU itself was, from June to September. However, no new episodes have been released since, making show #94 released on May 23, 2011, the last.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Further reading

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External links

• Scripting News Dave Winer's weblog
• The Computer Chronicles - The New Macs (1987) Dave Winer / Living Videotext Interview about the Apple Macintosh II