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Dave Winer
Dave Winer circa 2007
Born	(1955-05-02) May 2, 1955 (age 69) Brooklyn, New York City, USA
Known for	Outliners, Blogging, RSS, Podcasting

Dave Winer (born May 2, 1955 in Brooklyn, New York City) is an American software developer, entrepreneur and writer in New York City. 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 and Userland Software, a former contributing editor for the Web magazine HotWired, the author of the Scripting News weblog, a former research fellow at Harvard Law School, and current visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Family background and education

Winer was born on May 2, 1955, in Brooklyn, New York City, the son of Eve Winer, Ph.D., a school psychologist, and Leon Winer, Ph.D., a former professor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business who died October 3, 2009. Winer is also the grandnephew of German novelist Arno Schmidt and a relative of Hedy Lamarr. 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. In 1978 he received an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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 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.

ThinkTank, which was based on VisiText, was released in 1983 for Apple II and was promoted as an "idea processor." It became the "first popular outline processor, the one that made the term generic." A ThinkTank release for the IBM PC followed in 1984.

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.

MORE, released for Apple's Macintosh in 1986, combined an outliner and a presentation program. It became "uncontested in the marketplace" and won the MacUser's Editor's Choice Award for "Best Product" in 1986.

In 1987, at the height of his company's success, Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec for an undisclosed but substantial transfer of stock that "made his fortune." Winer continued to work at Symantec's Living Videotext division, but after six months he left the company in pursuit of other challenges.

Years at UserLand

Winer founded Userland Software in 1988 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, According to Newsweek, through this experience, he "revolutionized Net publishing." 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." These users included notably Chris Gulker and Jorn Barger, who envisaged blogging as a networked practice among users of the software.

In 1997 Winer was appointed advisor to Seybold Seminars due to his "pioneering work in web-based publishing systems." Keen to enter the "competitive arena of high-end Web development," 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, Microsoft's Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein.

In December 1997, acting on the desire to "offer much more timely information," Winer designed and implemented an XML syndication format for use on his Scripting News weblog, 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. 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. 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. 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.

With products and services based on UserLand's Frontier system, Winer became a leader in blogging tools from 1999 onwards, as well as a "leading evangelist of weblogs."

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.

In June 2002 Winer had coronary artery bypass surgery to prevent a heart attack and as a consequence stepped down as CEO of UserLand shortly after. 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," Winer has enjoyed a long career as a writer and came to be counted among Silicon Valley's "most influential web voices."

He started DaveNet, "a stream-of-consciousness newsletter distributed by e-mail" in November 1994 and maintained Web archives of the "goofy and informative" 800-word essays since January 1995, which earned him a Cool Site of the Day award in March 1995. From the start, the "Internet newsletter" DaveNet was widely read among industry leaders and analysts, who experienced it as a "real community." 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" 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." 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." Redacted DaveNet columns were published weekly by the web magazine HotWired between June 1995 and May 1996. DaveNet was discontinued in 2004.

Winer's Scripting News, acclaimed as "one of the oldest blogs," launched in February 1997 and earned him titles such as "protoblogger" and "forefather of blogging." Scripting News started as "a home for links, offhand observations, and ephemera" and allowed Winer to mix "his roles as a widely read pundit and an ambitious entrepreneur." Offering an "as-it-happened portrait of the work of writing software for the Web in the 1990s," the site became an "established must-read for industry insiders." Scripting News continues to be updated regularly.

Berkman Fellow at Harvard

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. While there, he launched the Harvard Weblogs community using UserLand software, and held the first BloggerCon conferences. Winer's fellowship ended in June 2004.

Visiting Scholar at New York University

In 2010 Winer was appointed Visiting Scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

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.

Edit This Page

In December 1999, Winer became the "proprietor of a growing free blog service" at EditThisPage.com, , hosting "approximately 20,000 sites" in February 2001. The service closed in December 2005.

Podcasting

Winer has been given "credit for the invention of the podcasting model." Having received user requests for audioblogging features since October 2000, especially from Adam Curry, Winer decided to include new functionality in RSS 0.92 by defining a new element called "enclosure," 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.

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.

In July 2003 Winer challenged other aggregator developers to provide support for enclosures. In October 2003, Kevin Marks demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures and pass them to iTunes for transfer to an iPod. Curry then offered an RSS-to-iPod script that moved MP3 files from Radio UserLand to iTunes. The term "podcasting" was suggested by Ben Hammersley in February 2004.

Winer also has an occasional podcast, Morning Coffee Notes, which has featured guests such as Doc Searls, Mike Kowalchik, Jason Calacanis, Steve Gillmor, Peter Rojas, Cecile Andrews, Adam Curry, Betsy Devine and others.

BloggerCon

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.

Weblogs.com

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. A swift and orderly migration off Winer's server was facilitated by Rogers Cadenhead, whom Winer then hired to port the server to a more stable platform.

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.

Share your OPML

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

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.

See also

• BloggerCon
• Living Videotext
• MORE
• RSS
• SOAP
• UserLand Software
• Weblogs.com
• XML-RPC

References

1. Winer, Dave (2010-06-20). "Getting back to New York". Scripting News. Retrieved 2010-06-30.
2. Winer, Dave (1994-12-27). "Spindler Speaks!". DaveNet. Retrieved 2009-06-10.
3. ^ Dave Winer's Personal Website: Curriculum Vitae
4. ^ Swaine, Michael (1991-09-01). "Calling Apple's Bluff". Dr. Dobb's. Retrieved 2009-06-08.
5. Sandberg-Diment, Erik (1983-05-17). "'First idea processor'". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-05-10.
6. Sandberg-Diment, Erik (1986-04-01). "New Software for making note scribbling easier". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-06-04.
7. Winer, Dave (1995-04-12). "Get up, and do it again". DaveNet. Retrieved 2009-06-08.
8. ^ Winer, Dave (1988). "Outliners & Programming". Userland. Retrieved 2008-08-15.
9. "Eddy Awards 1986". MacUser. 1986. Archived from the original on 2001-02-14. Retrieved 2009-05-19.
10. Dyson, Esther (1987-07-09). "Critical Mass" (PDF). Release 1.0. Retrieved 2009-06-08.
11. "Software Units Plan to Merge". New York Times. 1987-07-09. Retrieved 2009-06-04.
12. ^ Borsook, Paulina (1996-11). "Keeping the faith". Upside. 8 (11): 102–108. ISSN 1052-0341. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
13. ^ Rosenberg, Scott (2009-06-16). "The unedited voice of a person: Dave Winer". Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters (eBook ed.). New York: Crown. p. 50. ISBN 9780307451385.
14. "50 For The Future". Newsweek. 1995-02-27. Retrieved 2009-05-10.
15. ^ Rosenberg, Scott (2009-06-16). "The unedited voice of a person: Dave Winer". Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters (eBook ed.). New York: Crown. p. 59. ISBN 9780307451385.
16. Ammann, Rudolf (2009). "Jorn Barger, the NewsPage network and the emergence of the weblog community". Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia. Torino, Italy: ACM. pp. 279–288. doi:10.1145/1557914.1557962. ISBN 978-1-60558-486-7. Retrieved 2009-07-15. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
17. "The Seybold Institute". Seybold Seminars. 1997. Archived from the original on 1997-10-18. Retrieved 2010-05-23.
18. Morgenstern, David (1998-06-26). "Frontier blazing Internet trail". MacWeek. Retrieved 2010-05-31.
19. Gillmor, Dan (1998-12-06). "Small portals prove that size matters". San Jose Mercury News. Retrieved 2010-07-20.
20. Tim O'Reilly (2005-09-30). "Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds". O'Reilly and Associates. Retrieved 2007-01-29.
21. Winer, Dave (1997-12-15). "Scripting News in XML". Scripting News. Retrieved 2006-10-31.
22. RSS 2.0 specification
23. Kanes, Margaret (March 20, 2003). "Old data update tool gains new converts". CNET News. Retrieved 2007-01-26.
24. "NYTimes.com Expands Its RSS Feeds to 27 Categories". New York Times (press release). July 20, 2004. Retrieved 2007-01-26.
25. Festa, Paul (2003-08-04). "Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs". CNET News.
26. Gillmor, Dan (2004). "The Read-Write Web". We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
27. ^ Cone, Edward (2001-05). "Almost Famous". Wired. Vol. 9, no. 5. Retrieved 2009-05-13. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
28. Udell, Jon (2002-02-27). "Top ten technology innovators: Dave Winer". Infoworld. Archived from the original on 2004-11-04. Retrieved 2009-05-13.
29. Winer, Dave (2007-03-12). "An untold story of UserLand". Scripting News. Retrieved 2008-08-08.
30. Jones, K. C. (2008-07-31). "NowPublic Lists Silicon Valley's Most Influential Web Voices". Information Week. Retrieved 2009-05-11.
31. Markoff, John (2001-04-09). "An Internet Critic Who Is Not Shy About Ruffling the Big Names in High Technology". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
32. Nolan, Chris (1997-10-13). "Talk is Cheap". San Jose Mercury News. San Jose. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
33. Winer, Dave (1995-01-02). "What is an Agent?". DaveNet. Retrieved 2011-02-21.
34. "Still Cool Archive". Cool Site of the Day. 1995-03. Retrieved 2011-02-24. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
35. Einstein, David (1995-08-29). "Wozniak chastises his Apple: Biggest blunder was not sharing its OS". The San Francisco Chronicle (Final ed.). San Francisco. pp. B1.
36. Michalski, Jerry (1995-06-23). "What's a zine?". Release 1.0. Vol. 13, no. 6. pp. 1–24. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
37. Brockman, John (1996). "The Lover". Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite. Retrieved 2009-05-11.
38. Gillmor, Dan (2004). "From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond". We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
39. Gallagher, David F. (2002-06-10). "A rift among bloggers". New York Times. Retrieved 2011-01-22.
40. Ammann, Rudolf (2010-03-27). "Scripting News: Launched on 1 February 1997". Tawawa. Retrieved 2011-02-02.
41. Mitchell, Dan (2006-12-02). "A Bubble Watcher Watches Google". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-05-10.
42. Gilbertson, Scott (2011-02-03). "A DIY Data Manifesto". Webmonkey. Retrieved 2011-03-05.
43. Rosenberg, Scott (2009-06-16). "The unedited voice of a person: Dave Winer". Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters (eBook ed.). New York: Crown. p. 58. ISBN 9780307451385.
44. Paul Festa (2003-02-25). "Newsmaker: Blogging comes to Harvard as". CNET. Retrieved 2007-01-25.
45. Rosen, Jay (2010-01-14). "Dave Winer, Welcome to NYU". Rebooting the News. Retrieved 2011-01-21.
46. ""24 Hours In Democracy" Protests Telecom Act". Newsbytes. 1996-02-22.
47. "Next Step on the Net". The Washington Post. 1996-02-26. pp. A18.
48. Rosenberg, Scott (2009-06-16). "The unedited voice of a person: Dave Winer". Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters (eBook ed.). New York: Crown. p. 67. ISBN 9780307451385. {{cite book}}: More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help)
49. Stone, Biz (2002-09-11). Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content (1st edition ed.). New York: New Riders. p. 8. ISBN 0735712999. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
50. Winer, Dave (1999-12-08). "EditThisPage.Com". DaveNet. Retrieved 2009-06-10.
51. Winer, Dave (2001-02-13). "How to Make Money on the Internet v2.0". DaveNet. Retrieved 2009-06-10.
52. Kitchens, Susan A. (2005-11-28). "Bye bye, (free) Editthispage!". 20/20 Hindsight. Retrieved 2009-06-10.
53. Chen, Brian X. (2004-08-13). "This Day In Tech - Podfather' Adam Curry Launches Daily Source Code". Wired. Retrieved 2011-05-01.
54. Naze, Jodie (October 27, 2004). "Podcasting: The latest buzz". ITworld.com. Retrieved 2007-01-25.
55. Winer, Dave (2000-10-31). "Virtual Bandwidth". DaveNet. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
56. Winer, Dave, 2000-12-25 RSS 0.92 Specification
57. Winer, Dave, 2000-12-27 Scripting News: Heads-up, I'm working on new features for RSS that build on 0.91. Calling it 0.92...
58. Winer, Dave (2001-01-11). "Payloads for RSS". The Two-Way Web. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
59. Udell, Jon (2005-03-18). "Hypermedia: Why Now?". O'Reilly. Retrieved 2009-05-11.
60. Farivar, Cyrus (2004-10-28). "New Food for IPods: Audio by Subscription". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-05-11.
61. Winer, Dave, 2001-01-11 Scripting News: Tonight's song on the Grateful Dead audio weblog is Truckin...
62. Curry, Adam, 2002-10-21 UserNum 1014: Cool to hear my own audio-blog...
63. Gilchrist, Harold 2002-10-27 Audioblog/Mobileblogging News this morning I'm experimenting with producing an audioblogging show...
64. Winer, Dave (2003-07-18). "How to support enclosures in aggregators". RSS 2.0 at Harvard Law. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
65. Marks, Kevin (2003-10-04). "Bloggercon live video". Epeus' epigone. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
66. Curry, Adam (2003-10-12). "RSS2iPod". Adam Curry's Weblog. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
67. Hammersley, Ben (2004-02-12). "Audible revolution". The Guardian. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
68. Winer, Dave. "An occasional podcast". Morning Coffee Notes. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
69. Kramer, Staci D (2004-11-19). "Two Cities, Two Gatherings for Two Kinds of Content Creators". Online Journalism Review. Retrieved 2008-08-17.
70. Lord, Timothy (2004-06-15). "Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice". Slashdot. Retrieved 2009-05-11. {{cite web}}: Text "Slashdot" ignored (help)
71. Lord, Timothy (2005-06-17). "Slashback: Munich, Harlan, Alacrity". Slashdot. Retrieved 2009-05-11. {{cite web}}: Text "Slashdot" ignored (help)
72. Kramer, Staci D (2004-06-23). "Weblogs.com Rises From the Flames". Wired. Retrieved 2008-08-08.
73. Calore, Michael (2007-03-01). "Best Blogfights of 2006". Wired. Retrieved 2008-08-08.
74. Naraine, Ryan (2005-10-06). "VeriSign Acquires Dave Winer's Weblogs.com". eWeek.com. Retrieved 2009-05-08.
75. Arrington, Michael (2006-05-07). "Share Your OPML". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2009-06-08.
76. Bellinger, Amy (2006-10-17). Getting Acquainted with OPML. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc. pp. 5 -- 7. ISBN 9780596528225.
77. Winer, Dave (2008-01-23). "Share.opml.org, retired". Scripting News. Retrieved 2009-06-08.
78. Windsor, Tim (2009-04-20). "Rebooting The News: Dave Winer and Jay Rosen on saving journalism". » Nieman Journalism Lab. Retrieved 2011-01-22.

External links

Interviews

• Swaine, Michael (1991-09-01). "Calling Apple's Bluff". Dr. Dobb's. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
• Useem, Jerry (2000-10-30). "Dot-Coms: What Have We Learned? Profile: David Winer". Fortune. Vol. 142, no. 10. Archived from the original on 2000-11-10. Retrieved 2009-05-28.
• Winer, Dave (2004-07-29). "The Gillmor Gang: This week's special guest is Dave Winer" (Podcast). Interviewed by Steve Gillmor. Retrieved 2009-05-11. {{cite interview}}: Unknown parameter |cointerviewers= ignored (help)
• Winer, Dave (2005-09-06). "Dave Winer: Father of RSS and Web Logging" (Video). Interviewed by Robert Cringely. Retrieved 2009-05-10.
• Winer, Dave (2006-04-20). "Interview with Dave Winer" (Video). Interviewed by Amanda Congdon. Retrieved 2008-05-09.

Of related interest

• Scripting News Dave Winer's weblog
• @davewiner Dave Winer's Twitter feed
• CV and autobiographical sketch
• Eye on Winer A weblog devoted to criticism of Dave Winer
• UserLand.com Dave Winer's company
• FrontierKernel.org Frontier developer site
• Blogs.law.harvard.edu Harvard Law School Blogs
• DaveNet Essay newsletter by Dave Winer, 1994—2004
• Outliners.com Outline processors originally released by Living Videotext
• XML-RPC Remote procedure calls via XML
• SoapWare.org A directory for SOAP developers
• OPML.org Outline Processor Markup Language

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• 1955 births
• Living people
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• American computer businesspeople
• Berkman Fellows
• University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni
• Computer programmers
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• People from California
• Technology evangelists
• Wired (magazine) people
• American technology writers