YoIf you log in to Dave Winer’s blog, Script NewsYou will find a constantly updated note that will tell you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will change to 30. Which will mean that every day for three decades Dave’s blog will have been stirring things up.
He is a real notable figurea talented hacker and software developer who embodies the spirit of the early Internet. In the 1980s he created ThinkTank, a new type of software called “eyeliner”, that computerized the hierarchical lists that we all use when planning an article or a presentation, but that until then were scribbled on paper. Like Dan Bricklin’s spreadsheet, it was a novel idea at the time, but outlines are now found built into almost every type of writing software. There’s even one in Microsoft Word, for God’s sake!
In 1983, Winer founded a company, Living Videotext, to develop and market the general idea, and six years later he sold it to Symantec for enough money to allow him to pursue his own activities for the rest of his life. One of those things involved playing a leadership role in the development RSS (really simple syndication), a tool that allows users to keep track of many different websites in a single application (a news aggregator) that constantly monitors sites for new content. (Think of it as the hidden wiring of the web.)
Once the use of RSS feeds became common, someone came up with the idea of being able to attach audio files to them, and Dave implemented the idea with a nice geeky touch: attaching a Grateful Dead song. Initially, the new technology was called audio blogging, but eventually a British journalist came up with the term “podcasting” and it stuck.
So Dave was involved in creating some cool stuff, but it was blogging that brought it to a wider audience. “Some people were born to play country music” he wrote in one stage. “I was born to blog. At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I made a mistake. “Most people don’t have the impulse to say what they think.” Dave was the exact opposite. He was (and still is) eloquent and direct. His formidable track record as a technological innovator meant he couldn’t be considered a crackpot. The fact that he was financially secure meant he didn’t have to flatter anyone: he could speak his mind. And he did it. So from the moment it launched Scripting News in October 1994, it had a distinctive presence on the web.
Like many of us, he realized that what became known as the blogosphere could be a modern realization of Jürgen Habermas’s idea of “the public sphere” because it was open to everyone, everything was debatable and social rank did not determine who was allowed to speak. But what he – and we – underestimated was the speed and breadth with which tech corporations like Google and Facebook would enclose that public sphere with their own walled gardens in which “free speech” could be curated algorithmically while speakers were intensely monitored and their data extracted for advertising purposes.
In my experience, most journalists did not understand the importance of the blogosphere. This was partly due to the fact that, like Dr. Johnson, they thought that “no one but a fool ever wrote except for money,” so bloggers must be weird. (Which is difficult for those of us who are both bloggers and hacks.) But it was mainly because the mainstream media was mesmerized – and surprised – by the dizzying rise of social media. Journalists came to assume that the blogosphere must be something old-fashioned, a relic of the past, a meeting place for cranks, nerds and men with pigtails and shoes like Cornish pasties. Social media was what mattered.
If that’s really what they thought, then Winer has news for them: the blogosphere is alive, well, and thriving. In fact, it is where much of the best writing (and thinking) of our era is found. I can say that because I read it every day using a tool. feedland.org – which Dave built to make it easier to drink from the fire hose. As Clay Shirky, one of the first Internet sages, once putThere is no information overload: there is only “filter failure.” And there is no excuse to ignore the blogosphere.
what i have been reading
Centennial celebrations
Jimmy Carter turned 100 this week and James Fallows, who was once his speechwriter, wrote a generous appraisal of it in your Substack.
Look mom, no hands…
Our unequally distributed future is a surprising blog post by Allen Pike wondering if self-driving cars could become mundane.
The truth about monopolies
The antitrust revolution: the title of a good essay in Harper’s by Barry Lynn on democracy’s awakening to the dangers of corporate power.
