Thank You, Dave Winer

Michael Gartenberg | January 27, 2005, 03:09 PM

I just read Dave's post about getting awards. I don't know Dave that well personally. I've been a DaveNet reader since the days he wrote his emails to AppleLink users and continued when when he moved to his weblog format at scripting.com. We met a while back at the Jupiter weblog conference where I invited him to keynote and had dinner that evening with a bunch of other folks where we had a nice conversation and agreed and disagreed about different things. One thing I have noticed, is that Dave gets very little credit for someone who has done a lot of things that have helped a lot of people. He does gets flamed a lot. I suspect I know why that is, but it's really not right.

I don't give out awards but if I did, Dave would get one from me. Lacking an award to give, I do want to publicly say thank you to Dave. Thank You. Thanks for developing cool software in the 80's, like ThinkTank, Ready and More that were a joy to use and boosted my productivity. Thanks for creating cool technologies that you rarely get credit for like SOAP. Thanks for writing a daily weblog that keeps me informed and somewhat entertained even when I think you're totally off base. Finally, thanks for RSS which enabled some of the critical applications that I now use everyday. Not as meaningful as your Mom telling you how much she likes you, but I wanted to say thanks anyhow.

Remember when you were a kid and your mom used to say dorky things about how it didn't matter if other people liked you, because she liked you. You'd say "Oh mommmm, I know that."

Anyway, I don't get awards, but I wish I did. Given a chance I would certainly nominate this site for best technology in a weblog, if only for the cool Google-powered search, illustrated above in the post about Powazek. Did you know it usesthe Google API in conjunction with the local content database to only give you the bits you're looking for. It's a big thing, and as far as I know, of all the millions of weblogs they're tracking at Technorati (thanks to weblogs.com, by the way), this is the only one that has such a cool search command.

The funny thing is, if you live long enough the dorky things that Mom used to say start meaning more.
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