23 Facts About Dave Winer

Dave Winer is the founder of the software companies Living Videotext, Userland Software and Small Picture Inc.

Dave Winer is the grandnephew of German novelist Arno Schmidt and a relative of Hedy Lamarr.

Dave Winer graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1972.

Dave Winer received a BA in Mathematics from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1976.

In 1979 Dave Winer became an employee of Personal Software, where he worked on his own product idea named VisiText, which was his first attempt to build a commercial product around an "expand and collapse" outline display and which ultimately established outliners as a software product.

Dave Winer was based in Mountain View, CA, and grew to more than 50 employees.

Dave Winer founded UserLand Software in 1988 and served as the company's CEO until 2002.

Dave Winer's pioneering weblog, Scripting News, takes its name from this early interest.

In December 1997, acting on the desire to "offer much more timely information," Dave Winer designed and implemented an XML syndication format for use on his Scripting News weblog, thus making an early contribution to the history of web syndication technology.

Dave Winer continued to develop the branch of the RSS fork originating from RSS 0.92, releasing in 2002 a version called RSS 2.0.

Dave Winer resisted calls by technologists to have the shortcomings of RSS 2.0 improved.

In February 2002 Dave Winer was named one of the "Top Ten Technology Innovators" by InfoWorld.

In June 2002 Dave Winer underwent life-saving bypass surgery to prevent a heart attack and as a consequence stepped down as CEO of UserLand shortly after.

Dave Winer remained the firm's majority shareholder and claimed personal ownership of Weblogs.

In 2010 Winer was appointed visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute.

On December 19,2012, Dave Winer co-founded Small Picture, Inc with Kyle Shank; Small Picture is a corporation that builds two outlining products, Little Outliner and Fargo.

In February 1996, while working as a columnist for HotWired, Dave Winer organized 24 Hours of Democracy, an online protest against the recently passed Communications Decency Act.

In December 1999, Dave Winer became the "proprietor of a growing free blog service" at EditThisPage.

Dave Winer demonstrated the RSS enclosure feature on January 11,2001, by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News weblog.

In July 2003 Dave Winer challenged other aggregator developers to provide support for enclosures.

Dave Winer has an occasional podcast, Morning Coffee Notes, which has featured guests such as Doc Searls, Mike Kowalchik, Jason Calacanis, Steve Gillmor, Peter Rojas, Cecile Andrews, Adam Curry, Betsy Devine and others.

Dave Winer opened his self-described "commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy" in May 2006.

Since 2009, Dave Winer has collaborated with New York University's associate professor of journalism Jay Rosen on Rebooting the News, a weekly podcast on technology and innovation in journalism.