Eleven years ago, two or three guys with awesome programming skilllz sat down and almost simultaneously, and not knowing of each other at the time, wrote the first blogging software. Dave Winer was one of those guys and, like the rest of them, strongly dislikes the "who was the first blogger" frenzy that sometimes sweeps through the blogosphere. He was one of them, but nobody was "the first".
If you read or write blogs, it is thanks to guys like Dave. If you are reading this post in an RSS feed reader, it's because Dave invented and wrote the RSS. If you have ever been to an "unconference", it's probably because Dave pushed and popularized the format over the years. He can be maddeningly curmugeounly at times, but more often than not, he has profound insights and his blog is always worth reading - gives us all hope when we see that even after 11 years Dave's blogging has not lost any of its steam.
Last year, Dave gave out his first Blogger Of The Year Award to Naked Jen. When Dave picks a winner, it is worth paying attention.
This year, Dave has announced his second Blogger Of The Year Award to Jay Rosen. And it's a well deserved award. If you want to know how journalism works, how it is changing, where it is going and what role the blogs play in it, read the entire archives of Jay's blog - I did.
Jay reserves his blog for longer, thoughtful pieces, so his blogging frequency is low. But he has recently started microblogging on Twitter and FriendFeed and took it by the storm (do yourself a service and start following him on those places).
Readers of my blog are probably familiar with Jay, as I tend to link to him often. On Twitter and FriendFeed he is the one I tend to pay attention the most of all:
But now, thinking of all this in terms of science blogging community - who is the Science Blogger Of The Year? Do you need more than one category - perhaps separate Best Medical, Best Skeptical, Best Science-and-Politics, Best Lab Life, etc.?
My first nomination, in the category of The Best New Science Blogger (started writing in 2008) is SciCurious.
Nominate your favourites in the comments here.
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very nice info info never no that Dave wrote rss
If you are reading this post in an RSS feed reader, it's because Dave invented and wrote the RSS.
Dave Winer did not invent RSS. The format was created and named by Netscape in March 1999, as you can see from the RSS Advisory Board's history of the format. Winer helped to popularize RSS a year after it was abandoned by Netscape, but the credit for the format's creation belongs to Ramanathan Guha and Dan Libby of Netscape.
Technically correct, but they abandoned it at a stage when it was still totally crappy. Dave took it, did it basically from scratch, and made it work. Thus, I am not the only one who give Dave credit for inventing RSS, and rightfully so. Just because there was some poor prototype gathering dust somewhere should not mean he can be denied the primacy.
RSS wasn't a "poor prototype" back then. At the time Netscape foolishly pulled the plug, several thousand RSS feed publishers were sharing their content on the My.Netscape.Com portal.
The format was not technically crappy and rewritten from scratch, either. Dave Winer's first release of RSS 0.91 is nearly identical to Netscape's last release of RSS 0.91 a year earlier.
You can find all of this in the specs, and I encourage you to do so. This is a science blog. Facts matter.