Dave Winer

Dave Winer (b. May 2, 1955 in Brooklyn, New York City, USA) is a software developer who was a contributor to several popular XML dialects and APIs related to web publishing: RSS 2.0, XML-RPC, OPML, and the MetaWeblog API. He is also the author of Scripting News, an early weblog.

Early work

In 1979, after graduating with an MS in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Dave Winer became the lead developer for Personal Software. In 1981 he left to found Living Videotext, which created outliners: ThinkTank, Ready and MORE.

Years at UserLand

In 1987 Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec and used the profits to purchase a large home in Woodside, California (next to Joan Baez) and founded UserLand Software.

In 1992 UserLand developed Frontier, a scripting environment and a companion language called UserTalk for the Macintosh. After Apple took most of Frontier's market by bundling its own scripting language, AppleScript, with new systems, UserLand ported Frontier to Windows. The Frontier kernel was made open source under the GNU General Public License on September 28, 2004.

During the Web boom of the 1990s, Frontier became the technology behind Manila, a content management system that allowed the hosting of web sites and their editing through a browser. UserLand ran a free Manila hosting service, EditThisPage.com, which quickly began being used mostly to run weblogs, which Winer helped popularize. UserLand also ran one of the first Web aggregators, My.UserLand.Com, which allowed users to follow numerous weblogs from a single web page using a Netscape-created format called RSS. After Netscape abandoned its My.Netscape RSS project, Winer continued to promote a version of RSS, which he later called "Really Simple Syndication" (distinguishing it from other syndication formats based on RDF). Winer convinced The New York Times, among other media organizations, to adopt RSS.

Winer also developed the protocol XML-RPC, which led to the creation of SOAP (co-authored by Winer, Microsoft, and Don Box).

In 2001 UserLand combined My.UserLand.Com's aggregator and Manila's blogging functions to create Radio UserLand, a lower-cost client-side tool that let blogs be uploaded to UserLand's servers as part of the annual software license fee.

In June 2002 Winer had coronary artery bypass surgery to prevent a heart attack. Afterwards, he quit smoking and left his job as CEO of UserLand, although he maintained ownership of the firm, kept blogging, and kept promoting his flavor of RSS.

Berkman Fellow at Harvard

He then spent a year as a resident fellow at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and 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.

Contributions to podcasting

In collaboration with former MTV personality Adam Curry and others, Winer helped develop technical specifications for including media files as enclosure links in the RSS protocol, which permitted widespread adoption of podcasting. In June 2005, he gave the opening keynote speech at the Gnomedex 5.0 conference in Seattle (Curry gave the closing keynote). At that conference, Winer demonstrated his new open source OPML Editor application—a web-based take on the outliners for which he originally gained fame—where he, as of August 2005, is focusing most of his efforts. Winer publishes a podcast entitled Morning Coffee Notes.

Weblogs.com

After leaving Userland, Winer continued to maintain the domain weblogs.com, which provided a free ping-server used by most blog applications, as well as free hosting to many early bloggers. (Web-services like Feedster and Technorati monitor Weblogs.com for its list of the latest blog posts, generated in response to pings via XML-RPC.)

In mid-June 2004, Winer stopped providing free blog-hosting services there. Free hosting was soon provided elsewhere, however.

In October, 2005, Verisign bought the Weblogs.com ping-server from Winer, promising that services currently free there would still be free. The podcasting-related web site audio.weblogs.com was also included in the $2.3 million deal ^*.

Relationship to the public

Winer is known as one of the more polarizing figures in the blogging community. Tim Bray, a co-inventor of XML, wrote on his blog "Dave Winer has done a tremendous amount of work on RSS and invented important parts of it and deserves a huge amount of credit for getting us as far as we have. However, just looking around, I observe that there are many people and organizations who seem unable to maintain a good working relationship with Dave." Tim O'Reilly, who has had a rocky relationship with Dave for many years with regards to the technology conferences Tim organizes, says that Dave "can be a great contributor, but he can also decide, for no apparent reason, that someone is somehow on 'the other side,' at which point he becomes disruptive and abusive." [http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/winer_0900.html

Others speak of Winer with admiration and affection. "Dave is one of my favorite sources of information and opinion on the Web. His opinions are passionately held, well-informed, intelligent, argumentative, and quite often wrong," quipped Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams. Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls, a long-time friend of Dave Winer, expressed the sense of indebtedness shared by many of Winer's admirers: "When they scroll the credits of my life, Dave's is going to be one of the first names on the list. And when they scroll the credits for blogging, outlining, writing, scripting, journalism, XML, RSS, SOAP, podcasting and a pile of other technologies, standards and practices we will all eventually take for granted, the same will be true for those as well." [http://doc.weblogs.com/2005/10/07#aPostOfThanks

External links

Scripting News, Dave Winer's weblog
His CV and BIO
Eye on Winer A weblog devoted to criticism of Dave Winer

News coverage and interviews

NerdTV Interview (video, audio, and transcript available) - 30 September 2005
Almost famous, a Wired Magazine profile
EWeek story: VeriSign acquires Dave Winer's Weblogs.com
Slashdot Discussion On Weblogs.com Controversy Slashdot follow-up, three days later
Rocketboom Interview

Companies and technologies of relevant interest

UserLand
Frontier kernel
Manila
Radio Userland
Harvard Law School Blogs
Dave Net
Outliners
XML-RPC
Directory For Soap Developers
OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language)