winer

Dave Winer debuts 'classic' Little Outliner

Nearly 30 years ago, Dave Winer brought outlining to the digital masses with a Think Tank and MORE for the Mac and PC. Now he is going back to the future with Little Outliner, which launched this week. It's a basic outliner that currently works only in HTML 5-based browsers. An outline can only be accessed on the machine it was created on, and formatting options are limited. However, Winer said he has plans for his new company, Small Picture, to build more sophisticated outlining products than the "classic" Little Outliner, and enable what he calls "… Read more

Nationalize Twitter? Hmm, not so fast

Consider me second to none in embracing Twitter for all that it's worth. But the service's publicized brown-outs naturally raise questions about backup plans in case of further outages. The Gillmor Gang, in particular, has into this question, but the most searching critique I've come across comes from Echovar. It's worth reading the entire post. Here are a couple of excerpts:

It must be an odd thing to run a company in the midst of a debate around the idea of nationalizing your core technology. In a Venezuelan moment, the Gillmor Gang considers the idea that … Read more

What Twitter brings to the party

To this point, I have avoided getting into the conversations weighing the value and future of Twitter, FriendFeed, and the latest generation of community communications services. They clearly represent an evolution of instant messaging and the triumph of the feed.

Twitter is an early adopter service (see Kara Swisher's post) and hasn't yet caught on with mainstream Web users. The Twitter population is a rounding error compared with Web mail or Yahoo Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger.

But Twitter adds a new dimension to instant messaging beyond its SMS-like 140-character constraint with the concepts of following and followers, enabling … Read more

Dave Winer looks into Google's App Engine and sees the future

Software pioneer Dave Winer knows about disruptive technology. He was instrumental in formulating RSS, XML-RPC, OPML, outliners, and podcasting.

Here's part of what Dave had to say about Google's App Engine, a foray into making its infrastructure available to developers.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to … Read more

You want to mark April 1? OK, I've got a better suggestion

Forget April Fools' Day, there's real stuff to mark April 1, 2008. Thanks to MUNI, the mechanized joke which is supposed to function as a transport system in San Francisco, I'm late to the game. Anyway, kudos to Anil Dash and the other folks who have weighed in on the April Fools' hijinks. Some are funny, a lot are lame, and most are confusing. (Full disclosure: News.com wiseacres posted a few as well. I think they were OK, but you can judge yourself.)

But if you want to mark the occasion, I would offer two anniversaries for … Read more

TechCrunch vs. News.com editor: The final round

It's been quite a day. Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington says I'm not part of the "club" that is the blogosphere because, among other things, I simply "represent everything that we bloggers are trying to kill."

When I read that line, Groucho Marx's brilliant bon mot about clubs and their discontents immediately came to mind. But enough of that. Anyway, I think I've said all that I can about the Federated Media affair.

For those who (blissfully) may have been away at the beach the last few days, there's been quite … Read more