Early work in outliners 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. In 1981 he left the company and founded
Living Videotext to develop this still-unfinished product. The company was based in
Mountain View,
CA, and grew to more than 50 employees. It became the "first popular outline processor, the one that made the term generic." A ThinkTank release for the
IBM PC followed in 1984, as well as releases for the
Macintosh 128K and 512K. Ready, a
RAM resident outliner for the
IBM PC released in 1985, was commercially successful but soon succumbed to the competing
Sidekick product by
Borland.
MORE, released for Apple's Macintosh in 1986, combined an
outliner and a
presentation program. It became "uncontested in the marketplace" and won the
MacUser's Editor's Choice Award for "Best Product" in 1986. In 1987, at the height of the company's success, Winer sold
Living Videotext to
Symantec for an undisclosed but substantial transfer of stock that "made his fortune." Winer continued to work at Symantec's Living Videotext division, but after six months he left the company in pursuit of other challenges. According to
Newsweek, through this experience, he "revolutionized Net publishing." Winer subsequently shifted the company's focus to online publishing products, enthusiastically promoting and experimenting with these products while building his websites and developing new features. One of these products was
Frontier's NewsPage Suite of 1997, which supported the publication of Winer's
Scripting News and was adopted by a handful of users who "began playing around with their own sites in the Scripting News vein." Winer was named a Seybold Fellow in 1997, to assist the executives and editors that comprised the Seybold Institute in ensuring "the highest quality and topicality" in their educational program, the
Seybold Seminars; the honor was bestowed for his "pioneering work in web-based publishing systems." Keen to enter the "competitive arena of high-end Web development," Winer then came to collaborate with
Microsoft and jointly developed the
XML-RPC protocol. This led to the creation of
SOAP, which he co-authored with
Microsoft's
Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein. In December 1997, acting on the desire to "offer much more timely information," 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. By December 2000, competing dialects of
RSS included several varieties of
Netscape's RSS, Winer's RSS 0.92, and an
RDF-based RSS 1.0. Winer continued to develop the branch of the RSS fork originating from RSS 0.92, releasing in 2002 a version called RSS 2.0. Winer's advocacy of web syndication in general and RSS 2.0 in particular convinced many news organizations to syndicate their news content in that format. For example, in early 2002
The New York Times entered an agreement with UserLand to syndicate many of their articles in RSS 2.0 format. Winer resisted calls by technologists to have the shortcomings of RSS 2.0 improved. Instead, he froze the format and turned its ownership over to
Harvard University. With products and services based on UserLand's
Frontier system, Winer became a leader in blogging tools from 1999 onward, as well as a "leading evangelist of weblogs." In June 2002 Winer underwent life-saving
bypass surgery to prevent a heart attack and as a consequence stepped down as CEO of
UserLand shortly after. He remained the firm's majority shareholder, however, and claimed personal ownership of
Weblogs.com.
Writer As "one of the most prolific content generators in Web history," Winer has enjoyed a long career as a writer and has come to be counted among
Silicon Valley's "most influential web voices." Winer started
DaveNet, "a stream-of-consciousness newsletter distributed by e-mail" in November 1994 and maintained Web archives of the "goofy and informative" 800-word essays since January 1995, which earned him a
Cool Site of the Day award in March 1995. From the start, the "Internet newsletter"
DaveNet was widely read among industry leaders and analysts, who experienced it as a "real community." Dissatisfied with the quality of the coverage that the
Mac and, especially, his own
Frontier software received in the trade press, Winer saw
DaveNet as an opportunity to "bypass" the conventional news channels of the software business. Satisfied with his success, he "reveled in the new direct email line he had established with his colleagues and peers, and in his ability to circumvent the media." launched in February 1997 and earned him titles such as "protoblogger" and "forefather of blogging."
Scripting News started as "a home for links, offhand observations, and ephemera" While there, he launched
Weblogs at Harvard Law School using UserLand software, and held the first
BloggerCon conferences. Winer's fellowship ended in June 2004. In 2010 Winer was appointed visiting scholar at
New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Return to outliners On December 19, 2012, Winer co-founded Small Picture, Inc. with Kyle Shank; Small Picture is a corporation that builds two outlining products, Little Outliner and Fargo. Little Outliner, an entry-level outliner designed to teach new users about outliners, which launched on March 25, 2013. Fargo, the company's "primary product", Small Picture has stated that in future it may offer paid-for services to Fargo users. ==Projects and activities==