Another Tip of the Hat to Dave

Dave Winer is a role model of mine. He has made a career out of writing software on his own terms. He started his career by creating a new software category, the outline processor, with his product Think! He has iterated on that initial insight several times.

He was an early pioneer of blogging. Some say he invented blogging. He wrote one of the first Content Management Systems (CMS), a site called Edit This Page, built on top of his Userland platform, which incidentally used an outline processor as the code editor.

Along the way he defined OPML, the Outline Processing Markup Language, was part of a small group of developers that wrote the RSS specification, and invented the unconference.

About ten years ago he moved his software off of the Frontier language foundation that it was built on to Javascript. While a bumpy transition at first, it has proven to be a brilliant innovation.

I recently (a couple of nights ago) made an off the cuff comment suggesting that what we needed was a technological visionary to address the problem of preserving our digital legacy beyond the lifetime of the authors that create it. This is a subject that is near and dear to Dave. He has mentioned it often on his blog.

The next day I got a notification on Google+ from Dave. I couldn’t find where he had made a comment or anything. In fact, I’m not sure why I got a notification. I got two of them in fact. Neither lead to anything concrete.

Then yesterday he posted this blog post. I may be reading too much into it but I got the impression that he might have entertained the thought that I am a bot. I assure him that I am not. But then he knows that. I’ve been a beta tester of some of his excellent software.

It did get me to thinking and I wrote a blog post last night about how Facebook might actually be a breeding ground for emergent Artificial Intelligences. So, I guess at best we are riffing off of each other. And at worst, I’m delusional about him referring to me in his blog post. By the way, if anyone wants to get in touch with me, I’m jkelliemiller at gmail dot com.

UPDATE: I contacted Dave and asked him. He didn’t try to contact me on Google+. So I guess I am delusional. But I knew that too.


Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.