Happy Birthday Dave Winer
May 3rd, 2005 by jimmoore
Hi Dave, happy birthday! Here is my little link
to add to the party. All the tributes inspire me to tell my
own brief tale of Dave’s influence on me. I started blogging on
March 31, 2003 when I walked into the Berkman Center at Harvard with a
paper I’d written at white heat, The Second Superpower Rears its
Beautiful Head. I showed it to Dave and he said, hey, you should
put this up on the web, but only if you also start a blog. Dave
had just launched a free blogging service at Harvard, and was busy
evangelizing blogging in the community. I hemmed and hawed and
Dave wouldn’t let me off the hock. He sat me down and got me
going–right then and there–and the result has been stupendous.
Free speech made operational. Life direction changed. Thanks Dave.
In the summer of 2003 I volunteered for the Dean campaign up in
Burlington, going back and forth to Cambridge and always checking in
for advice with Dave. Dave in the meantime was busy pushing Chris
Lydon and inventing podcasting, while they both covered the
presidential primary in New Hampshire. In the fall, Dave was
pushing presidential bloggers, and pressing us in the Dean campaign (I
had become Director of Internet and Information Services) to open up a
free national blogging service. He was urging us to use some of the
money we were collecting on the web to give back to the web
community. I wish we had. We pulled in $30m and only
invested $1.1m in the web. If we had taken another half million
and set up a free blog farm, we might have been MSN Spaces, two years
ahead! As the campaign tightened and the Democratic establishment
trained their sites on us, Dave came up to Burlington to help
out. He wrote code, cajolled, argued, and most of all
inspired. Thanks again, Dave.
When the media companies began to wonder whether to join in the RSS
revolution, Dave focused on the New York Times. I believe that Dave’s
efforts are the single most important reason the Times decided to put
out feeds. And as the Times went, so did the other major media
companies. Thanks again, Dave.
