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Podfather Dave Winer Turns 50; Still Diggin'
May 02, 2005
In a surprise move only tangentially related to podcasting, iconoclast and developer Dave Winer turned 50 today.
Winer created RSS 2.0, the standard upon which podcasting is built. The standard includes support for enclosures, allowing MP3 files and other types of files to be referenced by items within a newsfeed. Though podcasting did not take off until 2004, Winer had implemented enclosures as early as 2001.
Winer named this new facility "payloads". Unfortunately, the term "payload" is associated with tractor trailers, warheads and viruses. As a result, his innovation failed to capture the public's imagination, dooming it to three years of obscurity.
In addition to his work on the RSS specification, Winer helped create one of the pioneering podcasts, Morning Coffee Notes.
Before he got involved with podcasting, Winer had already managed to own a software company, create a scripting language, pioneer blogging, contribute to Wired magazine, invent a few web standards, score the sweet Weblogs.com domain, be a Harvard Fellow (capital 'F'), and earn a reputation as being "blunt and thin-skinned". Gen X slackers take note.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T to the Podfather
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