I've just read Almost Famous by Ed Cone, an article that was in Wired in 2001 about Dave Winer.#

It's very interesting reading about a person you see almost every week and are not completely familiar with the history of. And this seems to be a very objective look at Dave.

One of my favourite things about Dave is how long he's seen the Web as a place for real people and a tool for real change. It's not just hype for him...

Winer's distinctive voice combines knowledge and neuroses; he writes out of a compulsion to be heard, to outline the world in a way that makes sense to him, and in so doing he has re-created himself as a narrowcast icon for a tiny but influential worldwide audience. The way he sees it, the medium has allowed him to graft something meaningful onto the material success that left him unfulfilled. "People should have their own Web sites," he says, sitting amid junk food wrappers, software manuals, and wires that clutter his work space. "To me, the Web is not about getting rich. It's about users, designers, stories, and pictures. It's a writing environment."

Even in 2001 before (as far as I can tell) the focus on blogs ability to effect and influence politics, you hear the echoes of the future of modern society in his words about them...

Instead, he devoted himself to Scripting News and DaveNet, and to advancing the cause of the blog. Anybody can start one by going to UserLand's EditThisPage site (www.editthispage.com) or by using free software from competitor Pyra's Blogger (www.blogger.com) to publish directly onto the Web. Winer says there are now about 15,000 weblogs on UserLand's servers; there are more than 70,000 on Blogger and thousands more scattered across the Web. Internet publishing, Winer contends, can be more powerful than print journalism, given its immediacy and lack of corporate or governmental filters. "I hope in the next war there are people with weblogs to let the world know what's really happening. It should be like a militia, like the Second Amendment. You can't beat the US government with handguns, but you can with information."

Fact-check their asses and don't let a story die if you're not ready for it to die. Once the media monarchy is dethroned, no longer can the State dictate what we can and cannot see. That's the power of free and open writing on the Internet, but it won't stay alive if we don't protect it. Protecting it is what getting people like Dean and the like to have an actual policy toward the medium that made them possible.

The most important part about technology is not at all the technology itself, it is not the code or the architectures we 'elegantly' design. Instead, what will be remembered in the future is the social shifts and changes that it made possible.

Winer's fluency in software built his career and his fortune, and even earned him a paragraph in the history of the personal-computing era. But intent as he is on making UserLand fly, he is clearly most invested in the much more commonly understood code of words, ideas, and emotions. "I'm a software designer - that's what I do. But as a writer, I want to leave a legacy."

Contrast this attitude with the one reveal by this comment,

Less charitable is Patrick Giagnocavo, part of the Zaphod collective. "The guy's ego is so large and his ego-dystonic state seems so obvious," he says. "Here's a closed software developer who thinks he's a journalist. Here's a guy who believes he has some special insights into the world of Internet development. Here's a guy who runs a site called Scripting News yet rarely talks about scripting. It's self-promotion at its finest. The guy who likes to name-drop whenever he can, because he thinks he's a lot more important than he is."

The message here is that you can only be a software developer, or a journalist, not both at the same time. There these experts and those experts and if we let either of them take even a little bit more power than we lose, so just shut up! More negatively still is the suggestion that seems to say that there are either no insights in the Internet or they have nothing to do with real people and real events. Then we get a quick reminder that being human is not allowed in the technology world and that every person should cut themselves down to honour the software and the company.

I think that a people-centric ideology that makes computing a tool in great social movements is much more important than the latest XML and Dave will be in my history book as one of the people who helped me realize that.