Publishing is what Winer was always interested in. An MS in Computer Science, he detested computers and the engineering culture at the school level and became familiar with computers only when he went to the college. Winer is a New York-based American software developer and entrepreneur, who is best known for his writing and his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services. For his writing, he has earned titles like “protoblogger” and is counted among “most influential web voices” of Silicon Valley.
Early Life
Dave Winer was born on 2 May 1955, in Brooklyn, New York City. His father Eve Winer was a PhD and a school psychologist. His mother Leon Winer was also a Ph.D., and a former professor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. In 1972, he completed his high school from the Bronx High School of Science. In high school, he started an underground newspaper. Later, he joined the Tulane University in New Orleans and graduated in Mathematics in the year 1976. He then completed an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in 1978.
Early Career
After completing his education, Winer started working in the computer time-sharing business, in the Empire State Building on the thirty-ninth floor. Later, he moved to Silicon Valley and joined a leading software company at the time, Personal Software, Inc., as the lead developer. The company worked on a software product VisiCalc, and he began to work on his own product idea named VisiText. While in the company, he came to the conclusion that the company did not ship what it produced. At the same time, the company started working on a commercial product around an “expand and collapse” outline display, an outliner software product.
In 1981, he left Personal Software and founded his own company named Living Videotext, where he further worked on the outliner. In 1983, he released ThinkTank for Apple II, which was based on VisiText, followed by the release of ThinkTank for IBM PC and Macintosh, etc.
In 1987, Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec. The deal paid him a fortune, and he worked with the newly formed Symantec’s Living Videotext division for the next six months.
UserLand
The next year, in1988, Winer founded another company named UserLand Software and was appointed the CEO of the company. Under the name of the company, he released a system-level, outliner-based scripting language, Frontier, for Mac. In the mid-90s, Winer became interested in online publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers’ online newspaper. He started working towards online publishing and developed a website for himself the ‘Scripting News’, in February 1997. Scripting News is described as “one of the web’s oldest blogs.”
In the same year, he started Frontier’s NewsPage, supporting Scripting News. Later, he, along with Microsoft, developed the XML-RPC protocol, resulting in the formation of SOAP, that he co-authored jointly with Microsoft’s Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein. In the same year, he developed an XML syndication format for his Scripting News weblog in order to provide his readers with much more timely information.
During the same time, RSS was created for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal, preceded by several trials at web syndication that did not obtain much popularity. In July 1999, Dan Libby produced a new version of RSS, RSS 0.91 incorporating elements from Dave Winer’s news syndication format. In April 2001, Netscape dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com and Winer, along with RSS-DEV Working Group, published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website. With a set of changes, Winer also released RSS 0.92 in December 2000 and RSS 2.0 in September 2002.
By 1999, Winer had become the leader in blogging tools and a leading evangelist of weblogs. The InfoWorld named him one of the “Top Ten Technology Innovators” in February 2000.
DaveNet
In November 1994, Winer originated DaveNet, to replace the standard news channels of the software business. DaveNet distributed newsletters over email and stored the goofy and informational web archives on it. Few of his newsletters included complaints against Apple’s management. The HotWired also published his censored columns from DaveNet, between June 1995 and May 1996. DaveNet won the Cool Site of the Day award in March 1995 but was discontinued in 2004.
Podcasting
Winer was receiving more requests for audio blogging features in the RSS from his readers and other bloggers, upon which he decided to include a new functionality in RSS 0.92, named the enclosure, that would transfer the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator. On January 2001, he first demonstrated this new feature in his Scripting News weblog, by enclosing the song Grateful Dead in it. With a built-in aggregator for both “send” and “receive” components in Userland’s weblogging product, Radio Userland, many of its users started doing audio blogging on it. In February 2004, Ben Hammersley suggested the word ‘Podcasting’ for ‘Audioblogging’.
Along with UserLand, Scripting News and Podcast, Winer also shares the credits for BloggerCon and Weblogs.com followed by some web authoring tools, including OPML Editor, River2 aggregator, Fargo, Dropbox-based outliner, etc.
Personal Life
Currently, Winer is living in New York. In June 2002, Winer underwent life-saving bypass surgery and had to step down as CEO of UserLand. He has been working as a successful writer in Silicon Valley and is referred to as one of the most prolific content generators in the web history. In 2003, he worked as a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School and was the visiting scholar at NYU School of Journalism between 2010-12.
In 2002, he was named among the ‘InfoWorld Top Ten Technology Innovator’. In 2001, he was awarded the ‘Chosen Tech Renegade’ by Wired for work on SOAP with Microsoft.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.