Twenty years ago this week, a software developer in California ushered in a new era in how we communicate. His name is Dave Winer and on 7 October 1994 he published his first blog post. He called it Davenet then, and he’s been writing it most days since then. In the process, he has become one of the internet’s elders, as eminent in his way as Vint Cerf, Dave Clark, Doc Searls, Lawrence Lessig, Dave Weinberger or even Tim Berners-Lee.
When you read his blog, Scripting News – as I have been doing for 20 years – you’ll understand why, because he’s such a rare combination of talents and virtues. He’s technically a very gifted software developer, for example. Many years ago he wrote one of the smartest programs that ever ran on the Apple II, the IBM PC and the first Apple Mac – an outliner called ThinkTank, which changed the way many of us thought about the process of writing. After that, Winer wrote the first proper blogging software, invented podcasting and was one of the developers of RSS, the automated syndication system that constitutes the hidden wiring of the blogosphere. And he’s still innovating, still pushing the envelope, still writing great software.
Technical virtuosity is not what makes Winer one of the world’s great bloggers, however. Equally important is that he is a clear thinker and writer, someone who is politically engaged, holds strong opinions and believes in engaging in discussion with those who disagree with him. And yet the strange thing is that this opinionated, smart guy is also sensitive: he gets hurt when people write disparagingly about him, but he also expresses that hurt in a philosophical way.
“In 20 years of blogging and developing software for blogging,” he writes in a reflective post about his career, “you meet a lot of people, and some of them do share love with you. To me that was always the wonder of blogging. I remember very clearly, in 1999 or 2000, looking at a blogroll and seeing dozens of names, mostly people I had never heard of, all of whom had blogs. It was at that moment that I realised that it had worked. But I was in for a rude shock when I clicked the links, they were all talking about me, and they didn’t like me! Oy.
“It’s hard to accept, when you’re expecting accolades, to find that the accolades come in the form of rotten tomatoes, hurled at maximum velocity, at your virtual body parts. But there it is. People express love in weird ways. I was once at a workshop in northern California, experiencing the same thing in realspace. I lamented, but was told later that I was the most loved person in the room. Go figure.”
In the two decades since Dave Winer more or less invented the genre, blogging has been through the usual internet hype cycle: lauded breathlessly as the new, new thing; rapidly taken up until it reaches a peak after which boredom sets in and the quest for the next new thing begins. At the moment the crazes are microblogging – twittering – and ephemeral communications such as Snapchat, but these too will pass.
And when they do, people will suddenly rediscover that some of the most interesting writing, thinking and discussion in the world still goes on in the wilds of the blogosphere, far away from the big-name media brands and online publications. They will rediscover Crooked Timber, or the astonishing Becker-Posner blog, in which a Nobel laureate and a distinguished American judge exchange beautifully crafted arguments about big subjects on a daily basis. Or they will visit Light Blue Touchpaper to find out what Cambridge’s computer security researchers are thinking about, or Freedom to Tinker in which their counterparts in Princeton are doing the same. And if they tire of that, they can always visit Larry Lessig’s blog to follow his campaign against corruption in US political life, or Doc Searl’s amazing weblog in which he manages to write interestingly on just about anything. And so on and so on.
It would be absurd to claim that this cornucopia of riches is all down to Dave Winer, but when the history of the web is written, his name will be up there in lights, because he was the guy who showed what blogging could do. And I, for one, hope that he will still be doing it in 2034.
