Dave Winer: A Toast

I still remember the moment I saw a big piece of the future. It was mid-1999, and Dave Winer called to say there was something I had to see.

He showed me a web page. I don’t remember what the page contained except for one button. It said, "Edit This Page" -- and, for me, nothing was ever the same again.

I clicked the button. Up popped a text box containing plain text and a small amount of HTML, the code that tells a browser how to display a given page. Inside the box I saw the words that had been on the page. I made a small change, clicked another button that said, "Save this page" and voila, the page was saved with the changes. The software, still in prerelease mode, turned out to be one of the earliest blog applications.

Dave was a leader in a move that brought back to life the promise, too long unmet, that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, had wanted from the start. Berners-Lee envisioned a read/write Web. But what had emerged in the 1990s was an essentially read-only Web on which you needed an account with an ISP to host your web site, special tools, and/or HTML expertise to create a decent site.

What Dave and the other early blog pioneers did was a breakthrough. They said the Web needed to be writeable, not just readable, and they were determined to make doing so dead simple.

Thus, the read/write Web was truly born again. We could all write, not just read, in ways never before possible. For the first time in history, at least in the developed world, anyone with a computer and Internet connection could own a press.

***

The words above are adapted from my book We the Media, which was published last year. The book is a result of the blog I started in 1999, a blog largely inspired by Dave. The past few years of experimentation and change further inspired me to leave a great newspaper job early this year, to try and see if I could help move along the notion of citizen journalism.

His early fueling of the blog is hardly Dave's only accomplishment. He's been a leader in RSS and podcasting, and has a way of seeing key pieces of the future before the rest of us.

I don't always agree with Dave. But even the disagreements have been instructive. When someone is ahead of things in so many ways for so long, you listen and learn.

Dave just celebrated his 50th birthday, and has been feted by many for that milestone. I add my good wishes here, with my certainty that he has many more years and achievements yet to come.

Comments

[Karl Karlsson]

Blog? That sounds more like a Wiki to me.

[Matteo Cardano]

Just for history sake ....
In mid-1996 I started building a web content editing system whose main idea was to have an "EDIT THIS PAGE" button or link in each web page of the site build anf managed by the system.
It soon became a product in 1997. It is called OpenShare and it is still on the market.

-- Matteo Cardano

[pb]

I just re-acquainted myself with Frontier last night and have got to say it is one of the coolest pieces of software ever developed. The combination of outliner, scripting language, verb set, web server and object database is very powerful. I hope they run with it over on Sourceforge.

[anonyMoses]

I first became aware The Power of The Dave when, back in 1994 or 5, a notion befell me to nab the name "Davenet", since I was a Dave and was on the Net...which was not nearly so parochial and ubiquitous as it is today. I soon realized that it was taken by a feller named Dave Winer, which I noted, and would see or hear about every now and again. My nom de nette at the time was Megajesus, and I would think that he too ran across that easily forgetable name now and again. It was a small place back then, as you may remember.

Fast forward ten years, and there he stands, guarding the coffee and donuts, refreshingly offered up for the pleasure of Chapel Hill's celebration of bloggery, adeptly hosted by the suave and jimpricute Anton Zuiker, and attended by such luminaries as, well, you, and, well, Dave.
(Not often one gets to use so many commas in so short a span, but I am sticking by it!)

I mentioned to him the days of yore, and his early usurpation of my sought property, leaving me with, primarily, "Virtual Bohemia: The Left Bank of Cyberspace", which, when coupled with the http, the ://, the www, and the com, becomes quite a mouthful...and one which not aided by autofill.

I was exactly one month into 50 when I met the jocular sage. Little did I know we were such cohorts. Or that I was older than he.

The question is: Can I tell him what to do?

But seriously...there is so little thanks or recognition in the work of creating the future, it is good to see a brother celebrated.

Dave Beckwith
Charlotte

[anonymous]

So you feel that deserves recognition for liking RSS and things that he claims he invented? Dave is nothing more than an old man that tells stories.

[anonyMoses]

I remember my first beer....