Dave Winer

Dave Winer (b. May 2, 1955) is a software pioneer, creating some of the first outliners, content management systems, and weblog tools. He's also the author of , one of the first and most popular weblogs.

History

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 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 initially gave away for free. After Apple destroyed most of Frontier's market by bundling their own scripting language, AppleScript, with new systems, UserLand ported Frontier to Windows and began charging for it.

During the Web boom of the 1990s, Frontier became the technology behind , 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 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 , 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. Afterwards, he quit smoking and left his job as CEO of UserLand to spend 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 community and held the first and second BloggerCon conferences. Winer's fellowship ended in June 2004.

Winer's detractors allege that he is overly blunt and thin-skinned. He is sometimes subjected to parody and mockery through websites such as WinerLog. His admirers, however, see him as a leader of clarity and purpose. One of the attendees at BloggerConII,State Rep. Mark B. Cohen of Philadelphia, said "Winer is a constructive and innovative force in many overlapping worlds: blogging, journalism, software development, politics, business, and academia, among others. Without his intellectual and personal leadership, the Internet would look very different and have much less impact today."