Listics

Good luck to Dave Winer in the Wired Rave Awards this weekend! Nobody has worked harder to evangelize the use of the web by the common person, nor has anyone given more of themselves - their energy, their intellect, their work product - to make it happen. Dean Landsman posted regarding Dave as the Blogfather the other day, and everything he says rings true.

Dave is up for a software designer award… here’s what the competion looks like:

SOFTWARE DESIGNER

•Jonathan Abrams – Friendster
•Toivo Annus, Janus Friis, Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallin, •Niklas Zennstrom – Skype
•Bram Cohen – BitTorrent
• iTunes Music Store Team – iTunes Music Store
•Dave Winer – RSS

Here are the judges…

Paul Boutin
WIRED Contributing Editor

Doug Engelbart
Co-founder, the Bootstrap Institute; inventor of the computer mouse

Rob “Commander Taco” Malda
Founder, Slashdot

Jonathan Schwartz
Executive Vice President, Software Group, Sun Microsystems

David Vaskevitch
Chief Technical Officer, Microsoft

I hadn’t heard of Dave until a few years ago, but I wouldn’t be surprised if our paths have crossed at some early Interop or Comdex or XML Devcon or somewhere. We have Sandhill Road in common, although our experience there is separated by a few decades and the Junipero Serra Freeway (I’ve always tried to stay as far away from the hot Woodside end of SLAC as possible).

I met him at BloggerCon where I found him to be less than cordial, but in fairness he had a lot on his mind. Hey, some of my best friends are fucking psycho nutcases with serious personality disorders. Dave is like way mainstream.

But what makes him special this spring is that, because of his love-child, RSS, he is up for a Wired Magazine Rave Award in the best software designer category. If you asked me about best software I’d have to go with something geospatial and all ArcIMS or something, but - shit! A little XML Interop hackistry is certainly cool too. And Dave goes way back years and years with this stuff. He worked on the SOAP spec with the IBM team. He’s an old XML RPC kind of guy. What I get about Dave is that he’s helping to lead us beyond the browser.

RSS may soon be the old news. It’s time to put a fork in it and give it an award. RDF is happening, and Atom is out of gate. I have no clue what direction Dave will be heading next. But I know that now that RSS is mainstream, Dave will be breaking new trails. I hope his buddy Boutin gives him the award so he’s in a good mood at BloggerCon II. Oh, and because he deserves it.

Dave… you won’t be reading this because you have drawn your line in the sand regarding my insights. But seriously man… I hope you get the award this weekend. You really do deserve it, and RSS is really good stuff. I can say this now that I’ve found an aggregator that handles all RSS versions, ATOM, modules like dublin core, content:encoding, xhtml:body, and basically kicks ass. It even exports and imports that mind-numbing OPML bullshit!

Good luck, ya big lug.