Dave Winer

The web was revolutionary when it came out, we needed a fresh start, the personal computer world was a complete mess. There was no networking standard. Now, over 30 years later, the web itself has become as messed up as what it replaced, so let's try again, this time with Markdown in place of HTML, and no big companies in charge. It may be small but it will be open. And don't forget the web itself was once very small. bigundo.org/

Every time I hear the term "podcast" in a story or even when people win big awards for their podcasts, I wonder why I have never gotten any kind of recognition for this and other contributions. I know there are people who think my contribution was just adding an element to RSS at some point, not even sure I actually added that element, but that isn't how you make a medium come to life. You have to iterate, evangelize, look for talented people who can make the medium happen and when all that doesn't make it happen, do it yourself, and show everyone that you don't need to be a CNN or NPR or MTV to do it. It's one of the reasons we have so many diverse sources of ideas and information. When I get tired of a podcast I look around and find a new one to explore and learn from. The medium may never make enough money to make anyone rich with money, but it has *always* been a source of wealth of knowledge, first about itself (in 2004) and today about every damn thing. So far the only mega-rich famous dude who has credited me is Jason Calacanis, which is strange because he and I had a falling out in the early days of RSS, over an event at a now-defunct conference. At first I didn't trust it, we were feuding for years, it seems. But he has had a rebirth it seems, and some of the things he does and says make me uncomfortable, but on the other hand, you take the recognition where you get it. And I am starting to trust his generosity of spirit. I'm going to release the most ambitious software of my long career pretty soon. I got so tired of the way Google is running the web as if it were a corporate platform, I thought why don't we try starting over with the web, use all the formats and protocols that work, but totally eliminate the corporate ownership. The reason this project worked now is Claude Code. In the last year I've built or restored four real products that combined define the web as if Markdown, RSS and Websockets existed when Netscape came out, and instead of evolving around JavaScript and CSS, the power belongs to the users, not the content providers. That simple change of rules for the web says if you want to write and publish via the web, it can't be fucked with by a Google-size monopoly or even a Substack-size monopoly. I'm 71 years old, and haven't needed money since my first and only IPO in the 80s. I invested conservatively, and occasionally bet on a long shot, and one of them came out great. I don't have the kind of money @jason has, but I don't need it either. I have what I call "transcendental money" -- ie it accumulates value through appreciation and interest all on its own, and I don't spend as much as it makes so it transcends time. Which has made it possible for me to practice my art all this time, which is developing and showrunning software as a medium. That situation aligned me with the web perfectly, because it doesn't need money to keep going either. Anyway I want to thank @jason for having a big heart, and hope many other people who perhaps I have offended by speaking my mind, will be as generous. I did more than get podcasting off the ground, and I ain't done yet! ;-) PS: I can't believe how old I am. But I have taken reasonably good care of myself, and managing large projects has gotten a lot easier for one person thanks to the AI tools that have come along and finally come to sufficient maturity that you really can manage large complex projects that way.

i remember you. ;-) we're going to hop back on the horse. they've been holding the web in a bad place for too many years, and now they're kicking scripting.com off the web unless i do what they want me to do. i think what i'm going to do instead is rebuild it, but make it so that chrome can't read it. then we start over, with a web that has markdown in place of html and the display of writing is entirely up to the user, so it's easy to read, and you can write with anything that can generate markdown. i think that's how the web should have gone, and i don't know if it's too late, but why not give it a try. them kicking my site off their web seems to be a perfect opening to collect that web and make it better than google's web. that would be reallllly satisfying. ;-)

small point but it wasn't the "term" that was the invention, it was the medium itself. the whole thing. and it turns out we knew at the time we were using a term that was in a wired article by a journalist we didn't particularly like. podcasting couldn't have happened until all the pieces were in place -- and you had have had the vision to see that. adam and i did, it was very much a collaborative project. we had all the pieces, just had to put them all together and then convince enough people to try it so it became a critical mass, which meant it could grow and grow and grow. the pieces -- mp3, http, rss, ipod. the all had to be there for it to work. btw, the fact that the EFF tried a case about someone who claimed a patent on podcasting didn't even begin to understand what podcasting is. we should have worked together, not just to protect the name, but to correctly explain what it is.

thanks. i was really determined. i just tried it on a whim, sent claude a link to the c source code, told it to look at the interpreter and asked if it could port it, basically it said yes, so i said go ahead, and it did it. then i just started giving it other jobs, the odb, verb set, and it got really confused at times because frontier isn't a programming language, it's a whole system with storage, verbs, runtime, etc. it's not like python, rust, javascript, etc. it was done by a mac developer (me) and team, who came out of the Unix world in 1980, and wanted both the system scripting ideas from Unix with the graphic UI of the Mac. And we got there. And it still works. Working with Claude taught me how unique Frontier is, because there is no prior art for it. Where there was plenty of prior art for most of the components.

# Frontier is rebooted in 2026 I don't think I've announced this here, but I was able to teach Claude Code how to port Frontier from a backup taken in 2014. It's an Electron app, but also can run headless. It's incredibly reliable for something that was coded almost from scratch so recently. The one big piece we already had was the outliner, but everything else is new code in JavaScript. Also the object database is imp in SQLite, so there will be substantial things it can do in SQL, and Frontier never had SQL integrated like this. (Note, the odb works exactly as it used to work, and we have guest databases.) We experimented with new tables of glue scripts, so we are able to program Mastodon and Bluesky, as easily as we used to program WordPress or Twitter. I went on to work on other projects, but I use Frontier in everything I do, it's where I write and maintain my JS code for the other projects, so while I haven't done any development on it in the last few months I've been using it constantly every day. I would love to get a new community going as long as it isn't hostile, but I think we're better at controlling the trolls in 2026 than we were in the early days of the web.