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.

I’m trying to be really, really good and hunker down on my book work, so I didn’t make any effort to check in at the Game Developers’ Conference even though it was right here in San Francisco, and now I’m kicking myself, because it appears that two of my favorite thinkers on the subject — my old friend Greg Costikyan, and Brenda Laurel, whose “Computers as Theater” was pivotal in shifting the course of my career — delivered blistering rants today at a panel there. I don’t know if the event will ever be more thoroughly documented, but in the meantime, these notes will do [link via BoingBoing]. Here are choice excerpts:

UPDATE: Greg has now posted the text of his talk. And it seems that at least some of Brenda Laurel’s talk drew from material in her essay here on “New Boys.”

## Mitch Kapor’s talk at Web 2.0 — a call to technologists to help propel a new populist reform movement — deserves much wider circulation beyond the conference hall: “We’re thinking a lot about the election just a few short weeks away. No matter who wins, I believe the kind of fundamental change we need to repair a damaged system will not come from the political establishment of either party. It must come from a popular reform movement, one which is heavily Internet-based, and comprised of a broad cross section of the American people.” Kapor has posted the full text
over at Of By and For. Alternet has a good interview with Kapor as well.

## William Gibson is blogging again. He explains his return to the fray: “Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succinctly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln. And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, ‘At times, to be silent is to lie.’ ” [via Tim Jarrett]

## Real Live Preacher’s book is out! It’s been a great gift to read this Texan preacher-turned-blogger’s moving tales from the pulpit and beyond here on Salon blogs. Now new stories and some of the best of the Web stuff is collected between hard covers. Check it out. (You can buy it at the Preacher’s favorite San Antonio independent boookseller.)

## “Joshtoberfest” in the Bay Area: Josh Kornbluth’s got a new movie of his autobiographical monologue “Red Diaper Baby” opening at the Mill Valley Film Festival and then at two theaters. And his great and timely monologue, “Ben Franklin Unplugged,” returns for a new production at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. More details here. Josh — who I’m proud to count as a longtime friend — is certainly one of the funniest people alive, and he has held tight over the years to his artistic compass, his political bearings and his remarkable impromptu punning ability. “Red Diaper Baby” is where you will, for instance, find Josh’s priceless joke about Communist economics: “We’ve learned from history that it’s very important after feudalism to stop in capitalism before moving on to socialism — because that’s where you get your appliances.”

## Alex Cohen’s Underground Clips site is an interesting and increasingly valuable experiment in fair-use-based posting of politically relevant video clips.

## I’m experimenting with this new bullet-point style. I used to use one that was an image, and that seems like overkill. I want to maintain ASCII purity. I’ll probably keep, uh, iterating.

Bruce Sterling’s amazing talk at SIGGRAPH about the next stages of the engagement between humankind and technology, and humankind and its environment, has already been widely linked, but I humbly add my admiring link.

Julie Powell of Julie/Julia revived her dormant blog for an eloquent tribute to the late demi-namesake of her site.

Did Ronald Reagan singlehandedly defeat the Soviet Union and win the Cold War? You’d think so, based on the tidal waves of adulatory coverage following his death. My old friend Jim Hershberg has spent much of his career as a historian specializing in the Cold War era, digging up important info from the archives of the former Soviet satellites, and he says, in this great Washington Post piece:

Read the rest.

“Editing by committee” is a phrase that strikes terror in many writers’ minds, but J.D. Lasica is unfazed. He’s working on a book, Darknet, on a subject dear to my heart: “exploring the idea that digital technologies are empowering people to create, reuse and reinvent media.” And now he’s posting the book, chapter by chapter, on a wiki, which means that anyone can go in and edit the book. Take a look and wade in with your (metaphorical) red pen.

Fiona Morgan used to work here at Salon on our news team; now she’s doing good work at the Durham Independent: Check out this piece on the conservative smear campaign against the group September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, or Fiona’s earlier opus on the copyright wars.

I first met Bruno Wassertheil nearly 15 years ago, shortly after I started dating the woman I’d later marry. Dayna had frequently referred to her mother’s companion by his first name, but it was only right before I met Bruno that she told me his last name. The moment she did, I could hear the former CBS Radio News correspondent’s plummy voice in my ear, as I’d heard it so many times through the years on my mom’s kitchen radio, which she kept tuned to CBS News every evening as she prepared dinner while I was growing up. I’d heard Bruno’s reporting from Israel through most of the ’70s, but in all that time I never knew how to spell his name.

When we did meet, it was inevitable that we’d end up arguing over politics: Bruno, who’d lived for decades in Israel and raised a family there, held views on Middle East issues that were often at odds with mine. Our disagreements didn’t keep us from becoming friends; if anything, they brought us closer. I learned in that first argument with him something that held through all the subsequent years of dinner-table debates: Bruno’s views were always rooted in a careful and respectful assessment of facts. He always knew what he was talking about, and he listened carefully to those who saw things differently. The same trait that made him such a good mealtime conversationalist was what had made him such a sterling news correspondent.

Bruno Wassertheil died last week. It happened very quickly — his cancer was first diagnosed in December — and I’m still a little in shock. The S.F. Chronicle wrote up a good obituary that you can find here. I’d add to its report that he was a brilliant Scrabble player; a wonderful step-grandpa to my children; a true pro as a journalist; and in everything a gentleman. I will miss him.

Tom Scoville, the guy who wrote the wonderful Silicon Follies serial for us back in the day, and who once created the Silicon Valley Tarot deck, is back with another appealingly oddball project: The Metrosexual Tarot.