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Dave Winer on the future of web publishing

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Dave Winer on stage now is going to start with a story (I can’t tell if he started it yet) and then move into questions.  Dave is describing it as something like a blog post.  Like podcasts, unconferences, and similar…ideas based on the idea of social media.

Dave says that Tim Berners-Lee had the first blog, not him (as it is claimed he says…) to settle (ha!) that debate.  In 1996 Dave Winer, while at Wired, wanted to help fight the communications decency act (the striking down of that law just celebrated it’s tenth anniversary).  A mail list started and flamed out.  Dave took some of the content there and built a site that became Scripting.com.

So a blog becomes and is the place where you can say your piece and no one can stop you.

Microblogging…Twitter as a microblog.  Text, link, go.  The link blog.  Is it useful?  Should it be part of WordPress?  Should there be a formal “style”? or “format”?

Future-safe archives…reflecting on giving RSS2 spec to Harvard.  Putting it on a server to hopefully save it for later.

Why shouldn’t your blog be around 100 years from now?  But given how we store and archive our blogs and data, how is that possible?  Is the next Faulkner or Hemingway out there and blogging?

(Dern more power block problems…overheated again).

Is ASCII and HTML the technologies that will stay?  Dave doesn’t have the answer for that.  When Dave republished the posts from the first day of his blog, April 1, 1997, he found that a lot of the links didn’t work anymore.  The sites are gone or have changed their structure so that the URLs are useless.

Archive.org…is that enough (Chris Heuer asks)?  Dave says it’s part of a solution not the whole solution.  How can then the domain changes be saved?

Wow, I didn’t know that Library of Congress is archiving music on 78s (78  RPM albums)!  Why, because they are easy to get the sound out of.  And think about the demise of punch cards, 5 1/4 floppies (when floppies flopped), even 3.5 in floppies…lots of computers don’t have disk drives anymore.  Laptops certainly don’t.  My first Dell laptop had a floppy drive that I could swap with the CD drive.  I think I used it maybe three times in three years.

“The greatest danger to archiving and protecting content is copyright”…I guess that’s true to a point.  Lorelle … “Pay first, then break”.  Is there a higher goal that preserving the content is above copyright and the law?

As I’m running low on battery juice…I have to let others take up the slack…

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