Scripting News at 30
Today is the 30th anniversary of this blog.
I did a roundup of thoughts when this blog turned 25. I stand by what I wrote then, but I’d add this. My blog started because I needed content to test a script I had written that sent emails on my Mac using Eudora, which was an early scriptable app and I had a nice scripting system that worked with it. I looked around for something to send (30 years ago today), and shot out an email to the people whose business cards I had collected at various tech conferences. It was a thrill, so I did it again, and again and three more times, before I realized hey I could use this thing to get my own ideas out there. And thus began this thing that I still do to this day. Look at the two posts I wrote about WordPress in the last few days. There may be hope to find a blogosphere buried somewhere in there. And it may be possible to give them some sweet new writing tools so they can get excited about writing on the web the way we did all those years ago. I actually am kind of optimistic about that. Maybe we can stand up something in the midst of the noise. When we booted up podcasting, approx 20 years ago, we had a slogan -- “Users and developers party together.” It worked! That is still the way I want to build stuff, it’s the only way I know how to do it. Blogging started out as a programming adventure and eventually became a form of literature. How about that. I’m up for doing more of that if you all are. But please expect to make contributions, don’t expect it all to come to you for free, because as we know nothing really is free.
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I appreciate all of the messages, but would appreciate them even more if they were on your blog. We need to keep using the tech. Blogging is kind of lost, and I would like to see that change. Every time you post something you’re proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don’t support linking, the web is still there and it still does.
The best version of Dave is the Hopeful Dave. Today, writing on his blog, he is still pushing for the blogs into the future, one line at a time.
In 1983, Winer founded a company, Living Videotext, to develop and commercialise the outlining idea, and six years later sold it to Symantec for enough money to enable him to do his own thing for the rest of his life. One of those things involved playing a leading role in developing 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.)
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Like many of us, he realised that what came to be known as the blogosphere could be a modern realisation of Jürgen Habermas’s idea of “the public sphere” because it was open to all, everything was discussable and social rank didn’t determine who was allowed to speak. But what he – and we – underestimated was the speed and comprehensiveness that tech corporations such as Google and Facebook would enclose that public sphere with their own walled gardens in which “free speech” could be algorithmically curated while the speakers were intensively surveilled and their data mined for advertising purposes.
Winer is rightfully renowned for his technical achievements — outliners as an application genre, RSS in general, and RSS in the specific context of podcasting in particular — but what’s kept me reading Scripting News for the entirety of Scripting News’s 30-years-and-counting run is his writing. He has such a distinctive writing voice that is impossible to imagine in any medium other than the web.
See also: Guy Kawasaki’s podcast about Winer’s career and this post about MORE:
We called it that because there was so much more in it than the earlier outliner, ThinkTank 512, we didn’t have any idea which new feature, if any, would be the one that turned people on.
We didn’t have the luxury of picking among them because our company was on the verge of going out of business. We needed help from Apple to make it to shipping. They gave us a loan of $400K, and we put our source code in escrow in case the company failed, which looked like a real possibility.
This is why listening to users is so important.
Sometimes they give you the idea that puts your product over the top.
That’s how our outliner became a blockbuster on the Mac in 1986.
It’s how podcasting was born in 2001.
Previously:
- X/Twitter Censorship
- Automattic vs. WP Engine
- The Enshittification of All Things
- ThinkTank Review From 1983
- The Rise and Demise of RSS
- 30 Years of Frontier
- IndieWeb Generation 4 and Hosted Domains
- Dave Winer Interview
- RSS on the Desktop, 15 Years Later
