Dave Winer
Encyclopedia
Dave Winer is an American
software developer, entrepreneur and writer in New York City
. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliner
s, scripting
, content management
, and web service
s, as well as blog
ging and podcast
ing. 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.
, 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
.
s 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, got 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.
in 1988 and served as the company's CEO until 2002.
After an unsuccessful attempt to establish UserLand's flagship product, Frontier, as a system-level scripting
environment for the Mac
in the early nineties, Winer came to take an interest in web publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers' online newspaper during San Francisco's newspaper strike
of November 1994, through which, according to Newsweek
, 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 blog
ging 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 blog
ging 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 podcast
ing 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
.
'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.
'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.
's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
, 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
.
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.
on November 6, 2004.
, Winer claimed personal ownership of the site, and in mid-June 2004 he shut down its free blog-hosting service without any notice, citing lack of resources and personal problems. A swift and orderly migration off Winer's server was made possible mainly thanks to help from 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 podcast
ing-related web site audio.weblogs.com was also included in the $2.3 million deal.
. Winer suspended its service in January 2008.
's associate professor of journalism Jay Rosen
on Rebooting the News, a weekly podcast
on technology and innovation in journalism.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
software developer, entrepreneur and writer in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliner
Outliner
An outliner is a computer program that allows text to be organized into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. Text may be collapsed into a node, or expanded and edited....
s, scripting
Scripting language
A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...
, content management
Content management
Content management, or CM, is the set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. In recent times this information is typically referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content...
, and web service
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
s, as well as blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ging and podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
ing. He is the founder of the software companies Living Videotext
Living Videotext
Living Videotext was a software development company founded by Dave Winer in 1983.Its slogan was "We Make Shitty Software... With Bugs!", although it was never publicly run in an ad....
and Userland Software
UserLand Software
UserLand Software is a US software company founded by Dave Winer in 1988. UserLand sells Web content management and blogging software packages and services.-Company History:Dave Winer founded the company in 1988 after leaving Symantec in the spring of 1988...
, a former contributing editor for the Web magazine HotWired
HotWired
Hotwired was the first commercial web magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of Wired Ventures, Hotwired was a separate entity from Wired, the print magazine, and had original content....
, the author of the Scripting News weblog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
, a former research fellow at Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
, and current visiting scholar at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Family background and education
Winer was born on May 2, 1955, in BrooklynBrooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, 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
Arno Schmidt
Arno Schmidt was a German author and translator.-Biography:Born in Hamburg, son of a police constable, Schmidt moved with his widowed mother to Lauban and attended the secondary school in Görlitz. He then worked as a clerk in a textile company in Greiffenberg...
and a relative of Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress celebrated for her great beauty who was a major contract star of MGM's "Golden Age".Lamarr also co-invented – with composer George Antheil – an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary to wireless...
. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science
Bronx High School of Science
The Bronx High School of Science is a specialized New York City public high school often considered the premier science magnet school in the United States. Founded in 1938, it is now located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx...
in 1972. Winer received a BA
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in Mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
from Tulane University
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...
in New Orleans in 1976. In 1978 he received an MS in Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
from the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
.
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 outlinerOutliner
An outliner is a computer program that allows text to be organized into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. Text may be collapsed into a node, or expanded and edited....
s as a software product. In 1981 he left the company and founded Living Videotext
Living Videotext
Living Videotext was a software development company founded by Dave Winer in 1983.Its slogan was "We Make Shitty Software... With Bugs!", although it was never publicly run in an ad....
to develop this still-unfinished product. The company was based in Mountain View
Mountain View, California
-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...
, CA
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, and grew to more than 50 employees.
ThinkTank, which was based on VisiText, got released in 1983 for Apple II
Apple II series
The Apple II series is a set of 8-bit home computers, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977 with the original 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
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
PC
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
followed in 1984.
Ready, a RAM resident
Terminate and Stay Resident
Terminate and Stay Resident is a computer system call in DOS computer operating systems that returns control to the system as if the program has quit, but keeps the program in memory...
outliner for the IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
PC
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
released in 1985, was commercially successful but soon succumbed to the competing SideKick
SideKick
SideKick was an early Personal Information Manager software application by Borland launched in 1983 under Philippe Kahn's leadership. It was notable for being a Terminate and Stay Resident program, which enabled it to load into memory then return the computer to the DOS command prompt, allowing...
product by Borland
Borland
Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...
.
MORE
More (application)
MORE is an outline processor application created for the Apple Macintosh in 1986 by software developer Dave Winer. An earlier outliner, ThinkTank, was developed by Winer, his brother Peter and Doug Baron....
, released for Apple's Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
in 1986, combined an outliner
Outliner
An outliner is a computer program that allows text to be organized into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. Text may be collapsed into a node, or expanded and edited....
and a presentation program
Presentation program
A presentation program is a computer software package used to display information, normally in the form of a slide show...
. 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
Living Videotext
Living Videotext was a software development company founded by Dave Winer in 1983.Its slogan was "We Make Shitty Software... With Bugs!", although it was never publicly run in an ad....
to Symantec
Symantec
Symantec Corporation is the largest maker of security software for computers. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index.-History:...
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 SoftwareUserLand Software
UserLand Software is a US software company founded by Dave Winer in 1988. UserLand sells Web content management and blogging software packages and services.-Company History:Dave Winer founded the company in 1988 after leaving Symantec in the spring of 1988...
in 1988 and served as the company's CEO until 2002.
After an unsuccessful attempt to establish UserLand's flagship product, Frontier, as a system-level scripting
Scripting language
A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...
environment for the Mac
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
in the early nineties, Winer came to take an interest in web publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers' online newspaper during San Francisco's newspaper strike
San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994
The San Francisco Newspaper Strike of 1994 was a labor dispute called by the Newspaper Guild in November 1994. Employees of San Francisco's two major daily newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner walked off the job for eleven days....
of November 1994, through which, according to Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, 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
Chris Gulker
Christian Frederick Gulker was an American photographer, programmer, writer, and pioneer in electronic publishing....
and Jorn Barger
Jorn Barger
Jorn Barger is an American blogger, best known as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. Barger coined the term weblog to describe the process of "logging the web" as he surfed...
, who envisaged blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ging as a networked
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...
practice among users of the software.
In 1997 Winer was appointed advisor to Seybold Seminars
Seybold Seminars
Seybold Seminars was a leading seminar and "the premier trade show for the desktop publishing and pre-press industry." It was founded in 1981 by Jonathan Seybold, son of the printing innovator John W...
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
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
and jointly developed the XML-RPC
XML-RPC
XML-RPC is a remote procedure call protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism. "XML-RPC" also refers generically to the use of XML for remote procedure call, independently of the specific protocol...
protocol. This led to the creation of SOAP, which he co-authored with Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
's Don Box
Don Box
Don Box is a Distinguished Engineer currently working at Microsoft.Along with Bob Atkinson, Mohsen Al-Ghosein, and Dave Winer, Don was one of the original four designers of SOAP, a basic messaging layer for web services....
, 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
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
syndication format for use on his Scripting News weblog, thus making an early contribution to the history of web syndication technology
History of web syndication technology
This article is specifically dedicated to the history of web syndication technology and, more generally, to the history of technical innovation on many dialects of web syndication feeds such as RSS and Atom, as well as earlier variants such as Channel Definition Format and more recent innovations...
. By December 2000, competing dialects of RSS
RSS
-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...
included several varieties of Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
's RSS, Winer's RSS 0.92, and an RDF
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...
-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
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
.
With products and services based on UserLand's Frontier system, Winer became a leader in blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ging tools from 1999 onwards, as well as a "leading evangelist of weblogs."
In 2000 Winer developed the Outline Processor Markup Language OPML
OPML
OPML is an XML format for outlines...
, an XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
format for outlines, which originally served as the native file format for Radio UserLand
Radio UserLand
Radio UserLand is a software package from UserLand Software, first released in 2000, which includes not only a client-side blogging tool but also an RSS aggregator, an outliner and a scripting language.-Features:...
's outliner
Outliner
An outliner is a computer program that allows text to be organized into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. Text may be collapsed into a node, or expanded and edited....
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 podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
ing and history of podcasting
History of podcasting
Podcasting began to catch hold in late 2004, though the ability to distribute audio and video files easily has been around since before the dawn of the Internet.-Precursors:...
).
In February 2002 Winer was named one of the "Top Ten Technology Innovators" by InfoWorld
InfoWorld
InfoWorld is an information technology online media and events business operating under the umbrella of InfoWorld Media Group, a division of IDG...
.
In June 2002 Winer had coronary artery bypass surgery
Coronary artery bypass surgery
Coronary artery bypass surgery, also coronary artery bypass graft surgery, and colloquially heart bypass or bypass surgery is a surgical procedure performed to relieve angina and reduce the risk of death from coronary artery disease...
to prevent a heart attack and as a consequence stepped down as CEO of UserLand
UserLand Software
UserLand Software is a US software company founded by Dave Winer in 1988. UserLand sells Web content management and blogging software packages and services.-Company History:Dave Winer founded the company in 1988 after leaving Symantec in the spring of 1988...
shortly after. He remained the firm's majority shareholder, however, and claimed personal ownership of Weblogs.com
Weblogs.com
' is a site created by UserLand Software and later maintained by Dave Winer. It launched in late 1999 as a free, registration-based web crawler monitoring weblogs, was converted into a ping-server in October 2001, and came to be used by most blog applications.' is a site created by UserLand...
.
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 ValleySilicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
'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
Cool Site of the Day
Cool Site of the Day is an early website created in August 1994 and originally maintained by Glenn Davis. Linking to one single recommended site off its homepage each day, it soon became an arbiter of taste on the Internet....
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
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
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
HotWired
Hotwired was the first commercial web magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of Wired Ventures, Hotwired was a separate entity from Wired, the print magazine, and had original content....
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 SchoolHarvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
's Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the Center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of...
, where he worked on using weblogs in education. While there, he launched the Harvard Weblogs community using UserLand software, and held the first BloggerCon
BloggerCon
BloggerCon was a user-focused conference for the blogger community that ran between 2003 and 2006. BloggerCon I and II , were organized by Dave Winer and friends at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society in Cambridge, Mass. Bloggercon III took place in San Francisco on...
conferences. Winer's fellowship ended in June 2004.
Visiting Scholar at New York University
In 2010 Winer was appointed Visiting Scholar at New York UniversityNew York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
24 Hours of Democracy
In February 1996, while working as a columnist for HotWiredHotWired
Hotwired was the first commercial web magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of Wired Ventures, Hotwired was a separate entity from Wired, the print magazine, and had original content....
, Winer organized 24 Hours of Democracy, an online protest against the recently passed Communications Decency Act
Communications Decency Act
The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was the first notable attempt by the United States Congress to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In 1997, in the landmark cyberlaw case of Reno v. ACLU, the United States Supreme Court struck the anti-indecency provisions of the Act.The Act was...
. As part of the protest, over 1,000 people, among them Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
chairman Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
, posted essays to the Web on the subject of democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
, civil liberty and freedom of speech
Freedom of speech
Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak freely without censorship. The term freedom of expression is sometimes used synonymously, but includes any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used...
.
Edit This Page
Starting in December 1999, Winer offered a free blog hosting service at EditThisPage.com, and claimed to be 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
Adam Curry
Adam Clark Curry is a broadcasting and Internet personality well known for his stint from 1987 to 1994 as a video jockey on the music video channel MTV. In the mid-1990s, Curry was a World Wide Web entrepreneur and one of the first celebrities to personally create and administer a Web site...
, Winer decided to include new functionality in RSS
RSS
-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...
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
Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The band was known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, improvisational jazz, psychedelia, and space rock, and for live performances of long...
song in his Scripting News weblog.
Winer's weblogging product, Radio Userland
Radio UserLand
Radio UserLand is a software package from UserLand Software, first released in 2000, which includes not only a client-side blogging tool but also an RSS aggregator, an outliner and a scripting language.-Features:...
, the program favored by Curry
Adam Curry
Adam Clark Curry is a broadcasting and Internet personality well known for his stint from 1987 to 1994 as a video jockey on the music video channel MTV. In the mid-1990s, Curry was a World Wide Web entrepreneur and one of the first celebrities to personally create and administer a Web site...
, 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
Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks is author of the weblog . He was Vice President of Web Services at BT. He became Principal Engineer for Technorati after working for both Apple and the BBC. At the TechCrunch event Realtime Stream Crunchup he announced that he would be joining BT to work together with JP Rangaswami. In...
demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures and pass them to iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
for transfer to an iPod
IPod
iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
. Curry then offered an RSS-to-iPod script that moved MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
files from Radio UserLand
Radio UserLand
Radio UserLand is a software package from UserLand Software, first released in 2000, which includes not only a client-side blogging tool but also an RSS aggregator, an outliner and a scripting language.-Features:...
to iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
. The term "podcasting" was suggested by Ben Hammersley
Ben Hammersley
Ben Hammersley is a British internet technologist, journalist, author, broadcaster, and diplomat, currently based in London, England....
in February 2004.
Winer also has an occasional podcast, Morning Coffee Notes, which has featured guests such as Doc Searls
Doc Searls
David "Doc" Searls , co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, is an American journalist, columnist, author and a widely-read blogger, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a fellow alumnus of the Berkman Center for Internet &...
, Mike Kowalchik, Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur and blogger. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York, and his second venture, Weblogs, Inc., capitalized on the growth of blogs before being sold to AOL....
, Steve Gillmor, Peter Rojas
Peter Rojas
Peter Rojas is the co-founder of technology blogs Gizmodo and Engadget, as well as the video gaming blog Joystiq . A 2006 article in New York magazine described him as "the best-compensated blogger in history".-Education:...
, Cecile Andrews, Adam Curry
Adam Curry
Adam Clark Curry is a broadcasting and Internet personality well known for his stint from 1987 to 1994 as a video jockey on the music video channel MTV. In the mid-1990s, Curry was a World Wide Web entrepreneur and one of the first celebrities to personally create and administer a Web site...
, Betsy Devine
Betsy Devine
Betsy Devine is an American journalist, author and blogger. She earned a master's degree in engineering from Princeton University, and according to her self-description, has "many years of immersion in geek sociology, including both Slashdot and Wikipedia flame wars".She is co-author, with...
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 SchoolStanford Law School
Stanford Law School is a graduate school at Stanford University located in the area known as the Silicon Valley, near Palo Alto, California in the United States. The Law School was established in 1893 when former President Benjamin Harrison joined the faculty as the first professor of law...
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 UserlandUserLand Software
UserLand Software is a US software company founded by Dave Winer in 1988. UserLand sells Web content management and blogging software packages and services.-Company History:Dave Winer founded the company in 1988 after leaving Symantec in the spring of 1988...
, Winer claimed personal ownership of the site, and in mid-June 2004 he shut down its free blog-hosting service without any notice, citing lack of resources and personal problems. A swift and orderly migration off Winer's server was made possible mainly thanks to help from Rogers Cadenhead
Rogers Cadenhead
Rogers Cadenhead is a computer book author and web publisher who is currently chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, a group that assists developers in using the RSS 2.0 specification. He graduated from the University of North Texas in 1991 and Lloyd V...
, whom Winer then hired to port the server to a more stable platform.
In October, 2005, VeriSign
VeriSign
Verisign, Inc. is an American company based in Dulles, Virginia that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc and .tv country-code...
bought the Weblogs.com ping-server
Ping blog
In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. The technology was first introduced by Dave Winer to...
from Winer and promised that its free services would remain free. The podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
ing-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 OPMLOPML
OPML is an XML format for outlines...
. Winer suspended its service in January 2008.
Rebooting the News
Since 2009, Winer has collaborated with New York UniversityNew York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
's associate professor of journalism Jay Rosen
Jay Rosen
Jay Rosen is a media critic, a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University.Rosen has been on the journalism faculty at New York University since 1986; from 1999 to 2005 he served as chair of the Department.He has been one of the earliest advocates and supporters of citizen...
on Rebooting the News, a weekly podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
on technology and innovation in journalism.
See also
- BloggerConBloggerConBloggerCon was a user-focused conference for the blogger community that ran between 2003 and 2006. BloggerCon I and II , were organized by Dave Winer and friends at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society in Cambridge, Mass. Bloggercon III took place in San Francisco on...
- Living VideotextLiving VideotextLiving Videotext was a software development company founded by Dave Winer in 1983.Its slogan was "We Make Shitty Software... With Bugs!", although it was never publicly run in an ad....
- MOREMore (application)MORE is an outline processor application created for the Apple Macintosh in 1986 by software developer Dave Winer. An earlier outliner, ThinkTank, was developed by Winer, his brother Peter and Doug Baron....
- RSSRSS (file format)RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
- SOAPSOAPSOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...
- UserLand SoftwareUserLand SoftwareUserLand Software is a US software company founded by Dave Winer in 1988. UserLand sells Web content management and blogging software packages and services.-Company History:Dave Winer founded the company in 1988 after leaving Symantec in the spring of 1988...
- Weblogs.comWeblogs.com' is a site created by UserLand Software and later maintained by Dave Winer. It launched in late 1999 as a free, registration-based web crawler monitoring weblogs, was converted into a ping-server in October 2001, and came to be used by most blog applications.' is a site created by UserLand...
- XML-RPC
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