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Dave Winer is a software pioneer, creating some of the first outliners, content management systems, and weblog tools. He's also the author of Scripting News, one of the first and most popular weblogs.
In 1979, after graduating with an MS from the University of Wisconsin Dave Winer became the lead developer for Personal Software. In 1981 he left to found Living Videotext which created the first outliners, ThinkTank, Ready and MORE.
In 1987 Winer sold the company 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 language for the Macintosh which they gave away for free. After Apple destroyed most of Frontier's market by bundling their own scripting language, AppleScript, with their systems, UserLand ported Frontier to Windows and started charging for it.
During the Web boom of the 1990s, Frontier became the technology behind Manila, a content management system that allowed you to host web sites and edit them through your 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 you to follow numerous weblogs from a single web page using a Netscape-created format called Really Simple Syndication or RSS. Winer also developed the protocol XML-RPC which was adapted to create SOAP.
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 you upload your blog 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. As a result, he quit smoking. He also quit his job as CEO of UserLand and took up a position as a resident fellow at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to research the use of blogging in education and launch a blogging community at blogs.law.harvard.edu.
Winer's blunt manner and low tolerance for criticism has made him many enemies, some of whom follow him around and generally make his life miserable. He's also the subject of much parody and mockery, particularly by sites such as WinerLog. His generally thin skin has frequently embroiled him in flamewars.
His frequent complaints about not receiving enough credit for things he feels are his, such as SOAP, weblogs, and RSS, have also alienated many.
History
Criticism
External links