Dave Winer Did Not Invent Blogging
March 3rd, 2008 by Bullshit MancusoDave Winer constantly pimps for credit in any field he’s touched the last 20 years. His latest complaint is that Wikipedia gives him no props for blogging:
I looked up blogging to find the names of some more obscure ones, the first hit was the Wikipedia page, and out of curiosity I searched the page for my name. It’s not there. All kinds of people get credit for building blogging as a practice and tools for blogging, but apparently, according to Wikipedia, I had nothing to do with it, nor did Scripting News or UserLand
He took this complaint to TechCrunch as well:
By coincidence yesterday I wrote up a long-standing issue I have with Wikipedia, that I don’t get any mention in articles on blogging (and also RSS though I didn’t mention that in yesterday’s piece). I’ve raised it quite a few times, even to the visionary, but since I’m not available for ‘fucking his brains out 24 hours straigHt’, the problem has never been turned over to his internal fix-committee, and people who want to know about blogging or RSS get the idea that other people did the work and took the risks that I did.
As time passes, Winer’s claim to have fathered blogging is being ignored by more writers who cover the subject. Scripting News began eight months before the term weblog was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997, so Winer’s claim is based on the shaky premise that his site was so distinctively a blog and so popular he should be called the leading originator of the form.
Wikipedia’s approach is eminently reasonable. It puts the coinage of the term weblog in context with a lot of bloglike sites that preceded it, many of which came long before Scripting News. NPR’s Andy Carvin also wrote a history of blogging that didn’t buy Winer’s bullshit.
Dave Winer is not the “blogfather.” He did not invent blogging. The medium was named by others and his role as an early adopter was no bigger than dozens of other writers and developers such as Barger, Peter Merholz, Cameron Barrett, Evan Williams and Ben and Mena Trott.
Winer should reconsider his decision not to sex up Wales, the former porn exec who’s newly unattached. They have a lot in common.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:16 pm
That’s pathetic even for winer. First he directs his sycophants to make changes to a Wikipedia article. Then the very next day he chastises Jimbo Wales for directing his sycophants to edit a Wikipedia article.
How many times have we seen this, over and over and over? winer constantly flames others for doing exactly what HE does. He looks for the mote in his neighbor’s eye while failing to see the beam in his own.
March 5th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Wikipedia now has winer included. Sad.