Dave Winer

Dave Winer (born May 2, 1955, in Queens, New York City) is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and writer who resides in New York City.

Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services, as well as blogging and podcasting.

He is the founder of the software companies Living Videotext, Userland Software and Small Picture Inc., a former contributing editor for the Web magazine HotWired, the author of the Scripting News weblog, a former research fellow at Harvard Law School, and current visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Winer was born on May 2, 1955, in Queens, New York City, the son of Eve Winer, PhD, a school psychologist, and Leon Winer, PhD, a former professor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

Winer is also the grandnephew of German novelist Arno Schmidt and a relative of Hedy Lamarr.

He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1972.

Winer received a BA in Mathematics from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1976.

In 1978 he received an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In 1979 Dave Winer became an employee of Personal Software, where he worked on his own product idea named VisiText, which was his first attempt to build a commercial product around an "expand and collapse" outline display and which ultimately established outliners as a software product.

In 1981 he left the company and founded Living Videotext to develop this still-unfinished product.

The company was based in Mountain View, CA, and grew to more than 50 employees.

ThinkTank, which was based on VisiText, was released in 1983 for Apple II and was promoted as an "idea processor."

It became the "first popular outline processor, the one that made the term generic."

A ThinkTank release for the IBM PC followed in 1984, as well as releases for the Macintosh 128K and 512K.

Ready, a RAM resident outliner for the IBM PC released in 1985, was commercially successful but soon succumbed to the competing Sidekick product by Borland.

MORE, released for Apple's Macintosh in 1986, combined an outliner and a presentation program.

It became "uncontested in the marketplace" and won the MacUser's Editor's Choice Award for "Best Product" in 1986.

In 1987, at the height of the company's success, Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec for an undisclosed but substantial transfer of stock that "made his fortune."

Winer continued to work at Symantec's Living Videotext division, but after six months he left the company in pursuit of other challenges.

Winer founded UserLand Software in 1988 and served as the company's CEO until 2002.

UserLand's original flagship product, Frontier, was a system-level scripting environment for the Mac.

Winer's pioneering weblog, Scripting News, takes its name from this early interest.

Frontier was an outliner-based scripting language, echoing Winer's longstanding interest in outliners and anticipating code-folding editors of the late 1990s.

Winer became interested in web publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers' online newspaper during San Francisco's newspaper strike of November 1994, According to Newsweek, through this experience, he "revolutionized Net publishing."

Winer subsequently shifted the company's focus to online publishing products, enthusiastically promoting and experimenting with these products while building his websites and developing new features.

One of these products was Frontier's NewsPage Suite of 1997, which supported the publication of Winer's Scripting News and was adopted by a handful of users who "began playing around with their own sites in the Scripting News vein."

These users included notably Chris Gulker and Jorn Barger, who envisaged blogging as a networked practice among users of the software.

Winer was named a Seybold Fellow in 1997, to assist the executives and editors that comprised the Seybold Institute in ensuring "the highest quality and topicality" in their educational program, the Seybold Seminars; the honor was bestowed for his "pioneering work in web-based publishing systems."

Keen to enter the "competitive arena of high-end Web development," Winer then came to collaborate with Microsoft and jointly developed the XML-RPC protocol.

This led to the creation of SOAP, which he co-authored with Microsoft's Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein.

In December 1997, acting on the desire to "offer much more timely information," Winer designed and implemented an XML syndication format for use on his Scripting News weblog, thus making an early contribution to the history of web syndication technology.

With products and services based on UserLand's Frontier system, Winer became a leader in blogging tools from 1999 onward, as well as a "leading evangelist of weblogs."

By December 2000, competing dialects of RSS included several varieties of Netscape's RSS, Winer's RSS 0.92, and an RDF-based RSS 1.0.

In 2000 Winer developed the Outline Processor Markup Language OPML, an XML format for outlines, which originally served as the native file format for Radio UserLand's outliner application and has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange lists of web feeds between web feed aggregators.

UserLand was the first to add an "enclosure" tag in its RSS, modifying its blog software and its aggregator so that bloggers could easily link to an audio file (see podcasting and history of podcasting).

Winer continued to develop the branch of the RSS fork originating from RSS 0.92, releasing in 2002 a version called RSS 2.0.

Winer's advocacy of web syndication in general and RSS 2.0 in particular convinced many news organizations to syndicate their news content in that format.

For example, in early 2002 The New York Times entered an agreement with UserLand to syndicate many of their articles in RSS 2.0 format.

Winer resisted calls by technologists to have the shortcomings of RSS 2.0 improved.

Instead, he froze the format and turned its ownership over to Harvard University.