Dave Winer just turned 50. Here’s a happy birthday to send his way.
I first met Dave over a decade ago at one of Sylvia Paull‘s digital salon gatherings. I didn’t know what to make of him but he was clearly smart and creative, as well as argumentative. I crossed paths with him again in the days of the San Francisco Free Press, when he pitched in with some code to help us post our stories during the newspaper strike. I joined his DaveNet mailing list and read his Wired column. In 1999, after I wrote about blogs (before we called them that), he came to visit us at Salon and urged us to start using his new Manila software, but we’d just built our own content management system and couldn’t face trying to integrate a whole different platform. Then Dave started writing about something called RSS, and at first I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Later I did.
I think I’ve been reading Dave’s stuff longer than I’ve read anyone else online, watching as he developed new ideas in full public glare, made mistakes and made history. At first, there was something unique about a software developer stepping forward and saying, “I’m tired of journalists messing up my story — I’m going to tell it my way.” Now there are thousands of programmers doing the same thing; the Web hums with their conversations. As I work on my book I’m tuning in to a lot of them, amazed at how much understanding is unfolding in this abstruse and hitherto cloistered field — and how great an example the programmers are setting for other groups going down the same road. I don’t think these conversations would be happening in quite the same way without Winer’s difficult, challenging, inspired example.
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